


When the Party's Over

by WildWren



Series: One Time at Wessex College [2]
Category: The Last Kingdom (TV)
Genre: Class Strife, Drug Use, Explicit Sex, F/F, F/M, Family Abuse, Mention of Institutional Transphobia, Mention of Intimate Abuse, Mention of addiction, Multi, Oral Sex, Queer positivity, Some Internalized Kink Shame, Unsafe Sex, Women Loving Women, alcohol use, bisexual awakening, family trauma, trans positivity, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28672890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildWren/pseuds/WildWren
Summary: After a charmed summer of romance (for Aethelflaed) and a....not-so-charmed summer of not-so-much romance (for Erik), both are back at Wessex College for the Fall Semester. Aethelflaed is deepening her friendships with Hild, Iseult, and Aldhelm and feeling unsatisfied in her sexual life. Erik is mostly just trying to keep on his Dad’s (and Sigefrid’s) good side. But a chance encounter at an Aylesbury House party will make them revisit their attraction for each other and come to terms with the painful circumstances that drove them apart.A follow up to Part One, Goodness Like a Gift
Relationships: Aethelflaed & Aldhelm, Aethelflaed Lady of Mercia/Eadith (The Last Kingdom), Aethelflaed Lady of Mercia/Erik Thurgilson, Hild/Iseult (The Last Kingdom), Sigefrid/Skade
Series: One Time at Wessex College [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2101398
Comments: 34
Kudos: 7





	1. after the summer

**Author's Note:**

> As promised, Part 2 follow-up to Goodness like a Gift. There’s also a part 3 in the works, but it’ll be a bit different. More on that later. 
> 
> I’m releasing this and giving myself permission to not craft a full narrative arc. Think of it more as a series of related vignettes. 
> 
> Also, just a reminder about this universe: Aethelflaed’s canon family members are actually non-related characters - Alfred’s a Lit professor, Edward was a guy on her dorm last year, Aelswith will show up in Part 3. Yet she still also has an (unnamed) family that shares some of their canon characteristics. The same sort of thing is happening with Eadith in this chapter. Aethelflaed knew a guy named Eardwulf last year, and also, Eadith has an offscreen Eardwulf-like brother. It’s just the squinty, sketchy way this universe works. I’ve also broken one of my world-building rules from Part 1 and have started giving made-up names to OCs when necessary. Welcome, Sharon. 
> 
> Shout-out to greenwillow, her Modern/College AU one-shots featuring Hild and Iseult are definitely very present in the way I've characterized them here (Iseult having a lovely window seat that she watches the world go by out of is 100% lifted from greenwillow's fic "Spark"). 
> 
> Also shoutout to naps4bats, I'm pretty sure the whole Brida-poly thing came from a Tumblr post she made!
> 
> CWs for the chapter: Drug Use, Mentions of Family Abuse and Trauma, Class Angst/Strife (internalized and otherwise), Mention of Institutional Transphobia, Explicit Sex, Oral Sex, Mentions of Relational Abuse, some internalized kink shame

“Did you talk to Dad today?” Sigefrid asked.

“Yep.” Erik answered, his voice flat. “Of course.”

They were in Sigefrid’s apartment, a first-floor unit in a refurbished old house a few blocks off-campus. It was sparse inside, in the habit of college boys everywhere. Besides the required array of high-priced gadgets, the living room held only a careworn brown sofa and a couple of tables strewn with the detritus of loose baggies and empty cans. A thick roll of bills was visible on the corner of the coffee table, as if it had just been casually dropped there - a classic Sigefrid flex. 

Sigefrid sat in a high-backed rolling chair with a black leather seat. Sigefrid’s girlfriend Skade sat in his lap, looking slightly peeved whenever his attention wandered away from her for more than a moment. Erik watched them from the couch. 

“How’s he doing?” 

“Oh…you know,” Erik said, and he gave his brother a look that he hoped conveyed the pure force of his disinterest in this conversation. 

“And Sharon?” 

Sharon was their Dad’s on-again-off-girlfriend of 5 years. Frankly, it was a hot mess of a relationship, and Erik knew his Dad was probably as good of a partner as he was a father, but still, they’d somehow made it last this long, and that was certainly something. 

“He didn’t mention her.” 

“Hmmm.” Sigefrid leaned over to drop a wad of spit into a plastic bottle on the table next to him, then tongued the clump of dip in his mouth. Skade made a face. “Probably not a good sign,” he said. 

“Probably not,” Erik agreed. 

“What, did your dad kill her or something?” Skade asked with a high-pitched laugh. 

“Shut the fuck up, Skade,” said Sigefrid, and she rolled her eyes. 

No, Dad hadn’t killed Sharon, Erik was sure of that. Sharon had her own shit though - a brother with a bad rap sheet and ties to some drug runners down South. And if she’d gone AWOL again, and Dad had to get involved to clean it up, well….someone _else_ might end up dead. Erik had no doubt about that. 

That was the shit that pissed Erik off the most. His Dad could be as sloppy as he wanted with his life. Even Sigefrid was allowed to make his own mistakes some of the time. _“Because Sigefrid knows how to clean them up_ ,” Dad would say. _“Yea, until he sends a kid to the hospital, and then you have to clean it up for him, don’t you?”_ Erik had said that once, in a foolish fit of petulance. He’d paid the price for it. 

No, it was Erik who had to be perfect, it was Erik who could never step a toe out of line, who had to check in with his Dad every day like an overgrown middle-schooler for no logical reason. “ _It’s ‘cause you’re a fucking idiot_ ,” Sigefrid would say. But Erik knew the truth. 

It was because he was soft. 

And that was the worst thing to be — in his family. 

Skade and Sigefrid had gotten over their tiff, and now Skade was prodding the lump of dip in his lip. 

“Spit it out,” she commanded. “Spit it out and close your eyes.” 

Sigefrid held her gaze as he dropped the wad of tobacco into his cup. “I’m not gonna close my eyes,” he said, in a deep voice. 

“Do it!” 

“What are you trying to do to me, woman?” 

Skade gave him a dark look and opened her hand to reveal a clump of shriveled gray bits. Sigefrid chuckled. 

“Where the hell did you get those?” 

“I have my secrets,” she said and raised one up as if to force it into Sigefrid’s mouth. 

He laughed, resisting her efforts. “I’m not sure I trust you enough for that.” 

“It’s _natural_ , Sig. It’s a natural trip. It’s gonna make you feel connected to the Earth.” She tried again, but he snapped his teeth as if trying to bite her hand. “I want you to come with me, Sig,” she said, making her voice a little husky. “I’ve already eaten some.” 

Erik interjected against his better judgment. “You didn’t seem too concerned with a…uh…“ _natural trip_ ” when you were doing lines of Sig’s coke the other night.” 

Skade laughed sharply and bit her lip. “Yea, well, Sig only has the best stuff.” 

“Yea, you know I do,” Sigefrid said and shook her a little so she bounced on his lap. 

Erik had to admit it: Skade was the perfect match for Sigefrid. Equal parts beautiful and terrifying, with long blond “dreadlocks” and a faux-tribal neck tattoo, she was the kind of girl who was interested in Sig _because_ of his family, not in spite of it. She’d come from the same kind of shit, Erik was certain. She’d never spoken to him about it, but he could tell. Probably not the _same_ shit, Erik knew, not exactly - not that weird, tenuous combination of dirty money and class jealousy that had colored Erik’s life. 

But still, she’d come from something like it - somewhere unsafe, somewhere angry, a home that wasn’t one. It was a look around the edges of her eyes, something ineffable in her body that echoed back at him in recognition. Even if he got the sense she was one of those “ _it wasn’t so bad, I survived it, didn’t I?_ ” kind of people, he could understand. He told himself that stuff too, sometimes. Sometimes it was easier that way. And he could feel some empathy for her, in that. 

Even if she was pretty insufferable. 

She had succeeded in forcing her fingers into Sigefrid’s mouth, and was now pushing little mushroom stems inside of it so that he had no choice but to chew. Then she kissed him, or did…something that involved chewing the same bit of mushroom together while their mouths were close. Erik had to look away from the spectacle of it. 

“You want some, Erik?” Skade asked, apparently finished with her mouth-based ritual. She was giving him the look she sometimes did - the one that suggested she’d like to eat him up as a small snack if she could. Erik thought it was meant to be sexual, but it was more unnerving than arousing.

“No,” he said firmly, standing up. “No, I’ve got some work to do.” 

“Star student, that one,” Sigefrid said to Skade. 

“Hardly,” he said. _Just ‘cause I didn’t have to take online classes over the summer to keep my transcript afloat…_

“Well, I’m sure you’ll make Dad proud.” 

“You know I always do,” Erik said, without emotion. “Have a good trip.” 

But they were kissing again. They didn’t pay him any mind as he let himself out of the apartment and turned his feet to head cross-campus back to his room. 

Erik wondered sometimes if he just needed to find someone like Skade. Well, maybe not _quite_ like Skade - he knew that would never work for him. But someone hard around the edges like her, someone who could understand just a little bit about his life and his family. Someone who might actually be able to survive — or thrive — in the world that Erik was forced to live in. 

But he had to admit, the prospects were slim. 

The summer had offered little in the way of romantic diversion. Erik spent his days working in his Dad’s “shop,” a high-end garage that serviced the high-end cars of high-end kinds of people — politicians and profiteers and other sharks who found it useful to be in business with Eyvin Thurgilson. It was almost a front - there was certainly big cash that moved behind the facade - but it was also like a speakeasy of sorts, a toxic watering hole where the underbelly met the overstory of the world, where a person with enough money could come to keep their hands clean. If Erik had wanted, he could have stepped a toe into that world, or entered fully, as Sigefrid had done a few years back. He wondered if his Dad wanted that, or if the whole experience was just a test of sorts, to see what Erik would do with the chance. 

But it was still also actually a garage, so instead, Erik just spent his time listening to music on his headphones and turning wrenches. 

His nights were spent in the narrow single bed in his room at his Dad’s house (it was always _Dad’s house_ , never _home_ ), and he was required to show up for at least one meal a day, clean-shaven, well-dressed, neat and controlled in appearance and behavior, performing a constant show of deference to his father’s iron will. 

There was little opportunity for casual dating, in the midst of all that. 

Going back to school had brought a rush of relief - as intense as a drug or an orgasm. Even if it was just the illusion of freedom, Erik would take it, and he tried to enjoy it in whatever ways he could - growing his beard out, wearing the clothes he wanted, skipping meals whenever he felt like it and eating junk food instead. 

Early in the semester, Sig had tried to set him up with someone from his boxing club, a girl named Brida. It seemed to Erik like a strange gesture of goodwill, as if Sigefrid felt bad about his treatment all summer and wanted to make it up to him in some small way. Erik had accepted the gesture, and arranged a date with Brida, and they had almost hit it off, as friends more than anything. They’d spent the night walking off-campus and drinking 40s of malt liquor, then set off fireworks at the abandoned ball field until a cop car came. They had to hide in the woods then, but Erik hadn’t even worried about getting in trouble - about the news getting back to his Dad - because Brida was so brazenly confident in the cop’s complete and utter stupidity. It was hard to feel nervous when she was making fake owl noises to confuse him, and they had laughed silently in the underbrush together until he left. 

Erik had almost kissed her - he’d been drunk enough to not overthink it too much - but then she’d made a little face and looked at him seriously. 

“Yea, so, my poly agreement with Ragnar, my primary — it’s only really for secondary relationships with other women.” She raised her eyebrows. “And I’m not really trying to re-negotiate that right now. Plus,” she gave a wince. “You’re not _really_ my type.” 

Erik had nodded sagely, as if this all made perfect sense to him, and then gone home to a series of very illuminating google searches. 

In truth, Brida wasn’t really his type either, although it was hard to say why exactly. What was his type? Very nice girls from normal families, who probably thought the kind of shit his Dad got up to only happened in movies, or in places far away from their lives. Girls who were soft like he was soft, who were a little foolish like he was foolish, foolish in wishing or thinking the world to be different than it actually was. The kind of girls who would never work inside his life. 

Yea, that was his type, he would think to himself, and then doubt the thought. That wasn’t really a type, was it?

After all — it was only based on a sample size of one. 

Aethelflaed pulled her wool peacoat a little tighter around her and took a left, heading down the narrow side street towards the college woods. The houses here were less collegial, more residential, and the sidewalk was thickly lined with trees still clinging to their last autumn leaves. The air was heavy with a sense of deepening cold and the scent of decay, and Aethelflaed enjoyed the sweet forlornness of it.

Iseult lived in the last house on the right before the woods took over completely. Her apartment was the second floor of a picturesque stone and stucco bungalow, a holdover from the town’s brief phase as an Arts-and-Crafts colony in the early 1900s. Aethelflaed let herself into the glass-panelled side porch and then took the stairs to the loft. 

Iseult answered quickly, looking a bit flustered and glancing back over her shoulder. 

“Oh, hi, Aethelflaed,” she said, with gentle cheerfulness. 

“Is this a bad time?” 

“Ummm….no.” Iseult looked behind her again, and Aethelflaed heard the muttered sounds of consternation from somewhere around the corner. “We’re just about to head out.” 

“Oh, shit, sorry! I should’ve texted first.” 

“No, it’s fine.” Iseult smiled calmly as another muffled curse drifted from inside the apartment. Iseult was dressed up, Aethelflaed realized. She always looked nice, but now her long hair was braided in an intricate style and she wore a dark shade of plum lipstick that popped on her pale face. 

“Is everything okay?” Aethelflaed whispered. 

“Yea.” One corner of Iseult’s mouth turned up. “We’re just going to have lunch with Hild’s parents. They’re in town visiting. I think she’s a bit nervous.” 

“I’m not nervous!” Hild strode to the door to greet Aethelflaed. Her hair was pulled back in a low bun, and she wore a dark brown cardigan over corduroy pants. “It’s just that — darn — toilet. You should really call your landlord about that,” she said to Iseult. 

Iseult smiled at her fondly. “I will, I promise.” It was almost amusing to see Hild so clearly flustered, and so clearly trying to hide it. 

“Well…I’ll get out of your hair,” Aethelflaed said, backing away from the door. “Sorry to interrupt.” 

“You’re welcome to hang out here while we’re gone,” Iseult offered. “There’s still some water in the kettle, and I’m sure Ru would love the company.” Ru was Iseult’s little rescue tabby cat. She spent most of her time curled up in a patch of sun in the apartment’s wide window seat and the rest of it begging for attention. 

“Uh…only if you’re sure,” Aethelflaed said. She felt guilty about inviting herself into the apartment, but that was why she had come here - to spend some time in this lovely, homey place. It had become a treasured part of her routine over the last few months. 

“Of course.” Iseult nodded. “We’ll be back in a few hours. It’s possible we may need some….uh…emotional support on our return.” She eyed Hild a little wryly. 

“I will be fine,” Hild said, with a tone of controlled steadiness. “It will be fine. My parents are…fine. It’s fine.” 

“Sounds like it’s fine,” said Aethelflaed, sharing a smile with Iseult. 

Hild fixed her with a gentle glare and then turned to Iseult. “Well…you ready?” 

“If you are.” 

Hild nodded, as if with steely resignation. “See you in a bit, Aethelflaed,” she said. And soon they were gone. 

When they’d left, Aethelflaed brewed herself some tea - Lavender Darjeeling, a blend Iseult made herself - and then settled down on the window seat, scratching Ru’s head and looking out the leaded glass panels onto the sprawling woods below. 

She loved Iseult’s home - it felt cozy and magical and a little wild, like a witch’s cottage on the outskirts of town. It was a beautiful unit, filled with hardwood floors and sloping ceilings and funny little windows - even if the toilet only flushed one out of three times. 

“ _You really found a good place here, huh?”_ Aethelflaed had said, when she first saw it. Iseult just shrugged casually. “ _Comes with practice. I’ve been living off-campus since I was a freshman_.” 

Later Hild had fumed to Aethelflaed privately. “ _Only because Wessex is run by a bunch of bigoted pigs_ ,” she’d said. And Aethelflaed had understood more then. 

She’d been hanging out with Hild and Iseult more and more throughout the Fall, and she was so grateful to be invited into their lives. Hild still lived on campus, in a sophomore dorm near Aethelflaed’s. But she spent most of her nights here, and Aethelflaed was invited to hang with them at least half the time as well, which she knew was not a small thing. It wasn’t just the friendship she was grateful for, although that certainly meant a lot. Beocca and Thyra were seniors now, their free time constantly filled with preparations for Thyra’s capstone art exhibition, or Beocca’s editorial duties on not one but two campus newspapers. It wasn’t intentional, Aethelflaed knew, but they had little time for casual socialization these days, and without Hild and Iseult, Aethelflaed thought she might have been truly lonely. 

But it was more than just the warmth of friendship that made Iseult’s apartment feel like home. It was the feeling of belonging to a group of people who were firmly identified in their queerness, who were open and out about it in a way that Aethelflaed had never truly known before in her life. Hild and Iseult were openly gay, and Iseult was trans as well, and they were rooted in an experience of pride in themselves and in their relationship that was almost transformative to witness. 

They knew themselves very deeply, and this was good for Aethelflaed to be around. Because she was coming to know herself more deeply as well. 

It had been a good summer. Aethelflaed’s parents had seemingly broken their pact to be the strictest, most fun-averse guardians known to the history of mankind and had let her spend June and July at an internship in the city, working for one of her father’s college friends at his corporate law firm. The job had been easy and boring - Aethelflaed spent four days a week printing out documents on fancy letterhead, then scanning the signed documents back into a secure server. Occasionally the monotony was broken up with a run to the corner coffee shop, and twice she’d been allowed to sit in on an official meeting between the firm’s law team and some…other lawyers? It was hard to say. She was given a little yellow legal pad for these meetings, but no instruction as to what to do with it, and so she’d spent several minutes trying to jot down all the jargon before giving up and reverting to important observations such as “red haired man is angry” and “glasses woman smarter than all these other guys.”

Luckily, no one ever asked to see her notes. 

She left the experience with the impression of corporate law as a deeply useless waste of both emotional and intellectual resources, and she hoped that whatever her future held, that was not a part of it. 

But that wasn’t the real experience. The real experience was the city. She lived in the spare room of her dad’s friend’s West Side apartment - a long maze of corridors that opened out onto a breath-taking vista of the city’s downtown skyline. She ate meals with the family - or rather, she ate the meals that the family’s hired cook prepared and left out like a buffet for everyone to eat on their own time, which was rarely together. She sometimes practiced music on the apartment’s grand piano, letting the notes echo out through the cavernous living room. 

But most of all, she got to know Eadith. 

Eadith was about as different from her corporate-lawyer Dad as it was possible to be. Effortlessly fashionable — with the most breath-taking vintage wardrobe Aethelflaed had ever seen, and the kind of long red hair that only existed on Hollywood stars and Disney Princess fantasies — Eadith was a rising Junior at a fancy art college downtown. She spent her afternoons drawing still lifes in charcoal in the aparment’s Western light ( _the best_ , by her estimation), and spent three mornings a week working at a local gallery that highlighted “new voices in modern art.” Aethelflaed assumed this was a very big deal when she’d learned, but then Eadith had said “Modern Art is so bourgeoisie at this point that is functionally meaningless,” and Aethelflaed took this to mean that she didn’t like her job much and also probably preferred Art History…? She wasn’t sure. It seemed better to just assume Eadith knew what she was talking about. 

Eadith was the kind of person who might have been pretentious, but she was so self-aware of the idiosyncrasies of her life, and so genuinely warm and funny about it all that Aethelflaed found it hard to feel any resentment towards her charmed, fashionable existence. 

“It’s cool that your Dad’s so supportive,” Aethelflaed had said once. “Of you wanting to be an artist.” Aethelflaed watched Eadith’s dad eat the same ham-and-cheese croissant for lunch every day while reading the Wall Street Journal, so the contrast was very present in her mind. 

Eadith shrugged. “Yea, it’s kind of sad, isn’t it? He’s spent his whole life as a corporate drudge so his kids can get art degrees and go to rehab for Oxycontin addictions.” This was a reference to Eadith’s brother, Aethelflaed knew. He was currently in a facility upstate — a very nice one, by Eadith’s description, with horseback riding and everything. 

“Well, he doesn’t seem to mind,” Aethelflaed had offered. 

“No, he doesn’t.” Eadith laughed. “I think he actually likes being a corporate drudge. No complaints here.” And she had rolled over on her bed and continued flipping through the hipster art magazine she was reading. 

Eadith wasn’t pretentious about being cool because she _was_ cool. She was cool and unique, smart and beautiful, and Aetheflaed knew she could have used this power to make Aethelflaed feel smaller and uglier and stupider in comparison, and desperate for her regard as a result. But instead, Eadith welcomed her into the warmth of it. She made Aethelflaed feel smart and beautiful and cool in return, in her own unique ways. She felt special not because Eadith merely liked her or tolerated her, but because they had genuine chemistry, an easy rapport blessedly free of the sort of anxiety Aethelflaed had come to expect in new social situations. Aethelflaed might have been out of her depth in conversations about the commercialism of modern art, but they talked about other things - history and philosophy, poetry and music - and Aethelflaed always found new insight in the talking. 

They’d go digging for records at Eadith’s favorite hole-in-the-wall music shops, and even though Aethelflaed didn’t have a record player, she’d challenge herself to find the most random and obscure things she could in the bins. Then she’d show them all to Eadith and get a warm glow of satisfaction when Eadith said things like “oh, that’s a good find,” or “you have _excellent_ taste, Aethelflaed.” 

Once they spent an entire day sitting in the park, waiting in line to get tickets to an outdoor Shakespeare production happening that night. They brought blankets and a picnic, and little bottles of wine spritzer hidden in a cooler, and the time had been well-spent, laying in the sunshine, draped against the Earth, reading passages out of their novels to each other. A little past lunch, Eadith’s eyes widened at the sight of an approaching man, and she turned to Aethelflaed very seriously. 

“Aethelflaed,” she said quietly. “Can I kiss you?” 

“What?” Aethelflaed asked, suddenly shy and nervous and a little excited. 

“Can I kiss you? It’s…an emergency.” 

Aethelflaed laughed at her sweet face, half-shaped with a wince. “Yea,” she said. And Eadith had. For a long time they’d kissed, and it was very warm and slow, like honey poured out of a jar. Eadith’s mouth tasted like wine and a bit of the spliff they’d smoked not long before, and the skin of her face was sun-warmed and soft where it met Aethelflaed’s cheek. When they broke apart, Eadith laughed and bit her lip. 

“Sorry,” she said. “That guy walking by was one very shitty ex of mine. You saved my life there.” 

“Oh,” Aethelflaed said, looking down and feeling a little heat in her cheeks. “So you were kissing me to hide from him?” 

“Technically, yea.” Eadith raised an eyebrow. “But it was also just a really good excuse to kiss you.” 

That night, Eadith and Aethelflaed watched _Much Ado About Nothing_ performed under the naked stars, and they held hands. 

It moved forward steadily after that. It was easy — unpressured and casual in the best sort of way. Aethelflaed spent one long afternoon in Eadith’s bed, letting Eadith sketch her in the shifting Western light for a set of figure studies. She was clothed at first, and then had gradually removed her shirt, then her pants, and then finally she was fully nude, letting Eadith take in the full shape of her, the rising and falling of her nakedness. It was very erotic, watching Eadith’s eyes move across her body, and then her hands moving across the page, long fingers guiding gentle strokes of the charcoal. 

And then Eadith was next to her, her hands doing what her eyes had done before, tracing of edge of Aethelflaed’s body and then the inside of it, where her eyes couldn’t reach. Aethelflaed arched into her hand, clutching the pillows behind her head with the pleasure of it. And then Eadith made her come with her mouth, and it was the same as the kiss had been, warm and slow like honey. 

When it was done, Aethelflaed felt a little flustered - suddenly shy and nervous like she had been before the kiss. 

“I’ve never…done this before. With a woman,” she said, and Eadith smiled in her slow, sweet way. “I don’t know if I’m ready to go…to go down on you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eadith said, and it was. It was all okay with Eadith. They could sleep together or they could not, and they would still be friends, Aethelflaed felt sure of that. But she wanted to give, not just take — she knew what it was to take too much. She didn’t have the hands of an artist, not like Eadith, but she thought she still could trace a body with them, and push inside to its innermost edge. And she was right. 

She felt less shy after that. 

Two weeks later, they were walking downtown, far from the apartment, in a neighborhood where Eadith’s artist friends shared a studio compound. It started pouring, hard and fast, hot sheets of rain soaking quickly through their clothes. Eadith was wearing her favorite vintage dress, and she grabbed Aethelflaed’s hand and ran, shrieking and laughing all the way to the covered alcove at the entrance to her friend’s building. 

They were both flush with the sweet thrill of it, and Eadith looked so lovely - her red hair clung with wet to her face, her wide mouth open slightly with effort. Aethelflaed kissed her against the brick edge of the entrance, pushing her back very gently and holding her there with the softness of her body. Nothing was ever rough with Eadith — Eadith didn’t like that, Aethelflaed knew — so she wasn’t rough then, just steady and unyielding in her desire. 

Eadith pulled her inside the studio’s entrance and let Aethelflaed kiss her up against one of the artist’s benches, scooting up to sit on the tabletop and opening her legs around Aethelflaed’s waist. 

“There’s no one in here,” Eadith assured. “No one’s coming.” 

But Aethelflaed wasn’t worried - she liked the openness of it, the risk. It was the edgiest thing they’d done together by far - kissing like that in a place where someone might find them. The thought sent another thrill through her, and she ran her hand under the hem of Eadith’s dress, rucking it up around her waist. 

“Is this alright?” Aethelflaed asked. Eadith never wore underwear if she could avoid it, and so Aethelflaed could touch her, sliding her fingers across her and into her. 

“Yea,” Eadith said, leaning back on her palms, letting her head roll lazily onto her own shoulder. And then Aethelflaed was on her knees, spreading Eadith’s legs further apart, putting her mouth to her with a soft, tentative touch. Eadith gasped, her hand light on Aethelflaed’s head, and for a moment Aethelflaed wished she could be rough. She wished she could dig her fingers into Eadith’s thighs, pull her tight against her, bite the soft skin inside her leg. 

But she couldn’t be rough. So she was very soft and very gentle, and she knew that Eadith liked it, the feel of her tongue against her, inside of her. 

Aethelflaed liked it too. It was just a different kind of kiss. 

“So…how was it?” Eadith asked later, when they were laying on her bed back at the apartment. 

“What?” 

“Your first time, you know…going down?” Eadith waggled her eyebrows a bit suggestively, and Aethelflaed laughed. 

“It was nice,” Aethelflaed said. It had been more than nice. She had felt such a strange surge of power in it, of control - as if she were touching every part of Eadith with her mouth, as if her entire body was under her command, stretched into the place where Aethelflaed’s mouth met her. But Aethelflaed thought that was maybe the wrong thing to say. She said, “I liked it. I liked it a lot.” 

“Hmmm.” Eadith made a face and looked away. 

“What’s that mean?” 

“Nothing, it’s just…another data point in my theory.” 

“What theory?”

“Oh, I just…” she rolled her eyes at herself and then looked at Aethelflaed with a wry smile. “I never felt very good about that part of myself, when I was sleeping with men.” She bit her thumb, her eyes becoming distant. “I always felt like it was gross, or…I don’t know, something to be ashamed of. But then I slept with a woman and I realized….I don’t know, I just think it’s different. Women aren’t as afraid of pussy.” And she laughed and Aethelflaed laughed too. 

“Hmm…” Aethelflaed knew what she meant, in a way. Aethelred had only gone down on her a handful of times, and always acted like he was doing a great favor for her when he did. Aethelflaed thought Eadith had been with her share of Aethelreds, and maybe even worse. She’d never once heard Eadith say anything positive about an ex-boyfriend. 

“It’s a good theory,” Aethelflaed said. “Makes sense. Although, I must admit that…I have experienced a counterpoint to it.” It was the closest Aethelflaed had ever come to mentioning Erik to Eadith. It’s not that she wished to hide anything. It was only that the memory of him lived in too tender a place to unearth into casual conversation. But a workaround like this was manageable, she could do that. 

“One of the lucky ones then,” Eadith said, smiling. 

“Maybe.” 

It came to an end, of course. Aethelflaed had to go home for a few weeks, spend time with her family before the fall semester started back up, and she probably wouldn’t come back to the city for many months. 

It was a tender goodbye. Eadith said, “ _I think you might be one of the sweetest lovers I’ve ever had_ ,” and Aethelflaed got a bit teary at that, knowing she’d been able to give some sweetness to this gentle, beautiful person. It _had_ been sweet, it had been lovely, and Aethelflaed would cherish each moment of it for long into her life. 

But it hadn’t been…wild, it hadn’t been intense. Aethelflaed hadn’t been high on Eadith, sick with the rush of her. That was _good_ , she thought. She was grateful for that. She didn’t think she could endure another rush and then the inevitable crash of something that felt like love. And when she went on her way, it hadn’t left her raw and aching inside.

Aethelflaed spent the last few weeks of the summer in her childhood home in a weird sort of rhythm, the strange sense of dissonance that came with fitting herself into a routine that no longer belonged to her. She caught up with high school friends she had increasingly little in common with. She helped her mom out by driving her younger brother to and from his lacrosse camp 3 times a week. She mostly endured her mother’s too-long graces before every meal, and mostly enjoyed the late-night conversations with her father in his study, even if she felt more and more alienated from his ideas about God. She didn’t tell her family about Eadith. 

Most evenings, she would walk the dog along the long suburban streets of her hometown until the sun went down and the asphalt cooled and the street lights came on one-by-one. She would think on the tender, lonely feeling of watching her life pass before her eyes, knowing each moment she moved through was instantly gone forever, never to be salvaged. 

It was these moments when Aethelflaed missed Eadith the most. It was the kind of feeling she could have brought to Eadith, and Eadith would have returned it with something funny or sweet or meaningful. But they stayed in touch, and that eased the missing. It wasn’t really an ending, Aethelflaed realized, it was just a change. Now they were long-distance friends instead of lovers, and that was lovely too, and one day if they both wanted it, they could be something more again. 

And still, there was something else about it, something Aethelflaed hadn’t even realized until late in their affair. Eadith was gentle and soft, and she was wounded, Aethelflaed thought, from someone or someones who had been very ugly to her. Aethelflaed never wanted to do anything to deepen that wound, and she hadn’t, and for that she was grateful. But it also made it so that Aethelflaed had to hold back the fullness of herself, the hardness within her, the impulses that couldn’t always be explained but that rose up in her anyway with a hot surge of need. Maybe she could have tried to explain it to Eadith, but she hadn’t, and so she’d been left with the shallow, hollow feeling that came with hiding. It left an echo in her body like a bad taste in her mouth. 

She thought maybe it would be easier, if she’d never known what it was like to have that part of her truly seen - to have it accepted, to be given everything she wanted and even some things she didn’t know she wanted, too. To be with someone who was hard like she was hard, who was wrong like she was wrong. 

But Aethelflaed did know what that was like. And she wondered sometimes if she would ever feel that way again. 


	2. an honest connection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aethelflaed gives some relationship advice to a friend. Erik gets a surprise visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weee...here's chaptie two. It's not my best work, it perhaps involves one too many Tumblr jokes (just kidding there are never too many Tumblr jokes), and it does some weird stuff with time jumps that may be incoherent, but I got it done and I'm getting it out. Shout out to greenwillow for the idea of Aldhelm x Mildrith which was subtly suggested in her fic "Socks." 
> 
> I just want to note that there is a brief reference to Aethelflaed x Uhtred in this chapter in a "that relationship didn't quite work out" sort of way. Just want to make it clear that I mean no dig on people who love Aethelflaed and Uhtred! This is not like a ship war thing I'm trying to do here. Imagine it as my interpretation of what might have happened between them if they'd gotten together early in Season 3, when Uhtred was still grieving Gisela. 
> 
> CWs for the chapter: mention of child death, a bit of an intense scene with an abusive dynamic present

Aethelflaed pulled her tray off the line, and made her way to the back corner of the dining room where she usually met Aldhelm for lunch. She was only a little surprised to see a head of copper-gold hair leaning in close to Aldhelm’s dark one. She was only a little disappointed, too, and she smothered it well. 

“Hey, Mildrith,” she said as she slid in across from them. “Hope I’m not intruding?” 

“No, no,” Mildrith said, smiling genuinely, and Aethelflaed returned it as best she could. 

Mildrith was nice. She was a good person, Aethelflaed knew this. She’d only gotten to know her a little, since her and Aldhelm had started seeing each other a month and a half ago, but still, she could tell the woman was smart and well-meaning, if a little intense. It was only…she never felt quite at ease in Mildrith’s company. 

“So anyway, as I was saying,” Mildrith said, turning back to Aldhelm. “It’s frankly ridiculous that more people aren’t worked up about this. Maybe it’s just because I was editing the press release until 1 am last night, but I just can’t help but feel like — if people want change, they actually have to do the work, you know?” 

“Of course,” Aldhelm said, nodding attentively. He was very good at that. 

“Thank _God_ for Young Odda. Did you know he’s having the posters printed out of his own pocket? I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“Young Odda _is_ a godsend,” Aldhelm said. 

Aethelflaed worked very hard to suppress her snort. Young Odda was a ridiculous, balloon-headed boy who trailed around in Mildrith’s wake doing whatever she asked for whatever campus cause she was currently spearheading. Aethelflaed had no doubt that he was useful, but…a godsend? She was almost certain Aldhelm was being ironic for her own benefit, which gave her an enjoyable little flush of guilt and pleasure. 

Either way, Mildrith didn’t seem to notice. 

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m rambling on.” She turned to Aethelflaed with an apologetic smile, but then her face froze a bit at the sight of Aethelflaed’s tray. 

“Oh,” she said, her eyes flicking down, then back up to Aethelflaed, then down again. She tucked her hair behind her ears with both hands. Her smile was a little fixed, like it had been pasted on. “Oh, I’m sorry, I just —“ 

Aethelflaed eyes were raking over her tray as well, trying to figure out what had caught Mildrith’s eye. Then she saw it, and her stomach fell with a cold feeling of panic. 

“I just thought you were in support of the single-use plastics ban, Aethelflaed.” 

“I am!” Aethelflaed assured, pulling the straw out of her smoothie with a frantic gesture. “I am, they — they put this in there, I didn’t ask for it or anything. I’ll use it again. I’ll reuse it later, I promise.”

“It’s just —” Mildrith said, with a wincing sort of expression that suggested she really didn’t _want_ to have to explain this to Aethelflaed _,_ but she would do it out of the goodness of her heart. “We do actually have to start refusing the single-use plastics, you know, if we want the campaign to go anywhere.” 

“I know! You’re right, of course, um, I just wasn’t thinking. I’ll do better next time.” Aldhelm was watching her with a vague expression of suppressed amusement, but he didn’t say anything. Aethelflaed thought he might have been a little scared of Mildrith too. 

Mildrith gave a small sigh, as if this was simply her cross to bear - explaining to ignorant, selfish people why their personal smoothie straw was not only the cause of the world’s suffering but of her own as well. 

But then her face did soften a bit. “Thanks, Aethelflaed,” she said, “I know you’re trying,” and somehow, Aethelflaed actually did feel a little less judged. That was just how it was with Mildrith. 

“Well, I should get going,” she said, straightening her neat brown blazer and standing from the table, tray in hand. “Odda may be a godsend, but I’m not sure he can run a copier on his own.” 

Aldhelm laughed, and Mildrith gave him a smile before turning away. It was sweet, but Aethelflaed couldn’t help but feel a little pang. Maybe the irony hadn’t been for her benefit. 

“Things seem to be going well, with Mildrith,” she said, when the other woman was far out of earshot. 

Aldhelm look down at his food, making a considering face. “Oh, yea. It’s fine. It’s good, I mean.” 

Aethelflaed narrowed her gaze on him, noticing the slight tension in his neck, the self-effacing look about him that was just a little _too_ effaced. 

“Are you sure about that?” She asked, trying to sound gentle. His face eased a bit, then he raised an eyebrow wryly, silently acknowledging his own bluff. 

“It….could be better,” he admitted. 

This was a new dynamic for them, or at least it was new- _ish_. Their relationship had begun with a purely scholarly bent - connecting over projects and homework - and Aethelflaed had found that simple and fulfilling, easy in an unemotional sort of way. But this fall, things had shifted into something more intimate. 

It started, Aethelflaed thought, when she had mentioned in conversation that she’d been seeing someone named Eadith during her internship in the city. A few minutes later, Aldhelm had casually mentioned his own summer fling - a male graduate student in his mother’s physics lab. It hadn’t felt like a watershed moment at the time - they had simply nodded at each other, expressed curious but unprying interest in the other’s relational wellbeing, and then moved on with the conversation. 

But it had changed things - that moment of mutual understanding - of seeing each other, and being seen, and being accepted. They had started talking more about personal, intimate subjects - always with a casual sort of banter that made it easier. But the lightness of it all was just another level of the intimacy, Aethelflaed felt. 

A few weeks ago, for instance, she’d asked Aldhelm about Aethelred - not for the first time, but with a more inquiring tone than she’d ever taken before. 

_“It’s just…the more I get to know you,” she explained, “the less I understand why you were ever friends with him. That sounds kind of rude, I know…”_

_“No,” Aldhelm shook his head. They were sitting on a bench behind the Library, watching a Japanese Maple tree turn to flame before their eyes. “I understand.” He gave her a wry look. “I only fear, if I tell you the truth…you may come to doubt my taste.”_

_Aethelflaed laughed. “Aldhelm, I_ **_dated_ ** _the guy. I cannot throw a stone.”_

_The corner of his mouth pulled up, his eyes narrowing in that pleasant, pleased way of his. Then he looked down in his lap, raising his eyebrows as if faced with a great and messy task to unpack. “Well, we went to high school together. I’m not sure if you ever knew that.”_

_“No.”_

_“And Aethelred, well….he was_ **_that_ ** _guy in high school.”_

_Aethelflaed snorted. “I think I can imagine what guy you mean.”_

_“Believe it or not, I was_ **_not_ ** _that guy in high school. And when we both came here, and we were roommates, I thought…maybe this was my chance, to be friends with_ **_that_ ** _guy. A classic case of high school wish fulfillment gone way too far, I’m afraid.”_

_Aethelflaed nodded. She knew what that was like. Hadn’t it been the same for her? Hadn’t she lost herself — or not even known how to find herself in the first place — when she’d first gotten here? She’d been fooled by Aethelred, too._

_But Aldhelm, Aldhelm was… “It’s just funny to me, I guess,” she said. “You’re just so much…cooler than Aethelred. I mean, like, objectively, that’s not even my biased opinion. People like you, Aldhelm. You know how to dress well. You know how to answer an e-mail. You’re like…a real adult. That’s cool now, you know.”_

_Aldhelm still wore his small smile, but Aethelflaed noticed his face growing just a little pink around the edges. “Yes well,” he said, with a slight cough. “Whatever I may or may not be now, you should have seen me in 10th grade. Let’s just say….a bowl cut is not my best look, alright?”_

_Aethelflaed couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Fair enough.”_

_“I mean….” He looked down at his lap, blinking in thought. “It was a little more than that, too. More than just…wanting to be friends with him.”_

_Aethelflaed nodded. She had wondered…once she’d learned more about Aldhelm’s identity…she’d wondered if something had happened there. But she hadn’t felt like that was something she could ask._

_It felt like Aldhelm was giving her an invitation now. “Did anything…happen, between you two?”_

_“No.” Aldhelm looked off into the distance for a long moment. “No.” And then he shook his head with a final sort of gesture that suggested there wasn’t anything more to say about it. He looked at her sidelong, raising an eyebrow. “I told you you’d judge my taste.”_

_“Aldhelm,” Aethelflaed said incredulously. “Again - I_ **_dated_ ** _the guy. I_ **_actually_ ** _slept with him. What could I possibly judge you for? Trust me, you dodged a bullet.”_

_They laughed together for a long moment. “You know,” Aldhelm said after a breath. “This is just a theory — and I don’t think they’re out about anything, if there’s anything to be out about…”_

_“Oh?” Aethelflaed asked, curiosity piqued._

_“I always suspected there was something happening with Edward and Eardwulf. Or something that they wished would happen. It was unclear. It was just…a feeling I got.”_

_“Wow.” Aethelflaed mused for a moment. She hadn’t picked up on any of that. But she hadn’t really been paying attention. “Sounds like there was…_ **_a lot_ ** _of homoerotic energy flying around that dorm room, Aldhelm.”_

_Aldhelm snorted, stretching his legs out with something like relief, easing his body back into the bench. “Honestly? There was. There really was.”_

“So…what’s not working? With Mildrith?” Aethelflaed asked now. They had lapsed into the easy, bantering tone that they used when talking about such personal things. “I mean, she’s intense, I know — _clearly_ —” Aethelflaed tapped her contraband straw against the side of her smoothie glass. “But that doesn’t seem to bother you.” 

“No.” Aldhelm smiled in thought. “No, I like that, I think. It’s just…” he looked down at his tray then back up, his eyes a bit distant. “I haven’t told her yet…that I’m Bi. And for some reason, I just keep not telling her.” 

“Ah. You think she would…be upset? Be weird about it?”

Aldhelm’s eyes were still distant - that look he sometimes wore as if he was reading something from his memory, or watching a vision play out in his mind. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s possible she would be really great about it. It’s just the fact that I don’t really… _want_ to tell her that gives me pause. I don’t know why.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand, as if to suggest he was making a fuss over nothing. 

“Well…” Aethelflaed said, watching a bit of smoothie drip from the end of the straw onto her tray. “Maybe it’s like…an intuition? An instinct. Maybe you should listen to it.” 

Aldhelm raised an eyebrow. “An instinct you say? That comes from the gut, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’m just stuck up here.” He tapped his forehead with one finger and Aethelflaed laughed. 

“You still have intuition, even if you don’t realize it.” 

“Hmmm.” Aldhelm nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll take it under consideration.” He let out a sigh and then fixed her with a different sort of look. “What about you?” He asked. “Are you still seeing Uhtred?” 

“Oh…uh…no.” Aethelflaed controlled her fluster. She hadn’t been thinking about her own love life, and it was a little disconcerting to be faced with it now. “No, we haven’t seen each other in a while. I don’t think we’ll, uh, hook up again anytime soon. It wasn’t bad —” she added quickly, feeling a bit of tenderness for Uhtred rise in her chest. “It just…” 

“Wasn’t very good either?” Aldhelm suggested. 

Aethelflaed smiled. “It was fine, really. I just…I don’t think he’s really over Gisela yet. Which is understandable, given the circumstances.” 

Gisela hadn’t returned to Wessex College this semester. She was living at home across the country with her family, because her younger sister was dying of cancer. It was one of those horribly heartbreaking things that was almost impossible to even speak about, for fear of inviting a great wash of grief into the room and drowning everyone in it. Uhtred certainly hadn’t been able to speak about it - at least not to Aethelflaed. It seemed he wanted to act like everything was normal, to be friendly and upbeat, the life of the party and the heart of his social group, as he always was. Perhaps that helped him cope with the break-up, she didn’t know. But it also made it hard for the two of them to connect on anything but a shallow, casual sort of level. And that could only carry them so far. 

Aldhelm was nodding, as if he could understand where her mind was without her needing to explain it all. She thought he might have been experiencing something similar with Mildrith - that feeling of not quite being seen, of not meeting another person from the middle of yourself, but from somewhere else, off center, so that you felt slightly stretched and taut in your own being. 

Aethelflaed sometimes felt it had been that way with everyone she’d slept with - with Aethelred certainly, less so with Uhtred, and even less than that with Eadith. But still, always a note, always a taste of dissonance, like two pieces not quite matched up. And with Erik…

But that hadn’t been real. She knew that. 

“I’m just enjoying singledom now,” she said to Aldhelm, pushing out of her own mind with a bit too much force. 

He chuckled. “Send it my regards, then. I suspect I may be reunited soon.” 

Aethelflaed smiled, and they lapsed together into companionable silence. 

There was another sort of undercurrent to these conversations with Aldhelm, always unspoken but often present in Aethelflaed’s mind. She got the sense that one day, after divulging all of their quiet relational baggage to each other, there’d be nothing left to do but try it out themselves - together - and see if they could do any better. This was perhaps not a very romantic premise. But Aethelflaed didn’t think it was necessarily an unromantic one either. 

Either way, it was not something she wanted to push for now. If they became lovers, she thought it might be hard to go back to being friends — or just different — and this friendship was not something she was ready to give up quite yet. You could have sex with anyone, she thought to herself sometimes. But an honest connection was harder to come by. 

That was one thing she knew for sure. 

Erik walked across the quad, making his way towards the Art Building in the far West corner. It would have been quicker to cut over the squares of grass, which lay browning and wet in the late Fall chill. But Erik liked the neatness of following the path, even if it took him a little out of the way in a roundabout, zig-zagging course. He liked the ordered control of it. He could just follow the lines, and he didn’t have to think. 

But that meant he was taken by surprise when he realized two women were approaching him on the path. He looked up and a felt of spasm of panic at the sight of one of them — brown-haired, slim, a little taller than the other. 

But then the spasm passed. 

It wasn’t Aethelflaed. 

Erik had seen her once that semester, across the quad, walking with a man he didn’t know. He’d known it was her. He’d watched her for a moment, to be sure, and then he had been sure - the bag over her shoulder, the way she moved her arms, her hands curling in front of herself and then opening out, as if she were making an important point. 

And then he’d felt weird, watching her, and he’d walked away. 

Sometimes Erik thought it was strange that they didn’t run into each other more, at the dining hall, or at parties, but then he remembered that he skipped half his meals and most of the parties he went to were Sigefrid’s parties, and it didn’t seem so strange in light of that. 

It was all for the best, he knew. 

The Art Building was a bit of a cavernous hulk - built in the 70s and never refurbished. The doors needed to be replaced but hadn’t been, and so they just got chained shut every night by the custodian. From what Erik had gathered, this was to do with a dwindling Arts budget and a new renovation on the Econ Building, and some students were very angry about it. 

But the doors were open now, and Erik let himself in, enjoying the sense of calm he felt in the building’s entrance chamber - even if one of the lights was out, and he had to walk up the staircase in half darkness to the second floor Ceramics wing. 

Erik wasn’t taking an art class - that wasn’t the kind of thing he’d ever be allowed to do - but he had seen a poster in the Dining Hall vestibule a couple months ago for an Open Pottery Studio and had gone on a whim. After a little orientation to the Ceramics Workshop and a few tutorials on wheel-throwing, he’d been given a pass to use the Studio on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and he’d been going regularly ever since. 

Erik liked the smell of the clay, and the weight of it as he cut it into pieces and threw it on the wheel. He even liked the weird, dry feeling it left on his hands - it made them feel well-used and important, like they’d been doing something that mattered. He wasn’t very good at it, he knew. Most of the things he made on the wheel were squished or squiggly or droopy. He was a little better at hand-building, sculpting and carving the clay into strange, abstract forms - experimenting with the tools until he had a vague sense of what he was doing. It was the experimenting he liked the most, the freedom of it. It didn’t matter if it worked or not, it was just fun to try. His favorite things he made were completely useless - weird little sculptures with no purpose whatsoever except to please him. 

He made a few of those today - abstract shapes, built up and then carved back into…something. Erik thought they looked kind of like ships — he’d been thinking about boats since his Oceanography field trip a few days ago — but they were different than ships, too. They were simply themselves. When he was satisfied, he put them on his tray in the corner, for the kiln cycle the studio assistant would run later that week. Then he washed the slip from his hands and headed back to his room, feeling eased in a way he could not even give words to. 

He should have known. He should have had a sense of foreboding — it was the kind of thing he’d learned to just feel into, for no clear reason. Once, when he was in high school, he’d had a flash of intuition, like a premonition - he’d just known that his father was going to come home bloody and full of anger, ready to take it out on him and Sigefrid. 

And that’s exactly what had happened. 

But Erik didn’t have any premonitions now, so he was confused when he found the door to his dorm room unlocked. When he opened it, he saw Eyvin standing over his desk, sifting through the papers on them, and his stomach went too cold with fear to feel any shock. Or maybe it was the other way around. He wasn’t sure.

“Dad? What are you doing —?” Erik said, without thinking. “I mean….Hi.”

Eyvin looked almost too big for the room. He was a huge man, taller and broader than Erik, with a sharp, grizzled face that some people seemed to find handsome, in a sort of “unsheathed knife” kind of way. His gray hair and beard were close-cropped and bristly. He wore a button-down shirt tucked into tailored pants - nice clothes, expensive, like he almost always wore. But no matter how hard he tried, Eyvin Thurgilson would never not look like a thug stuffed into a fancy suit. 

Now he was raising his eyebrows at Erik in a speculative way, as if he hadn’t expected him to make a blunder so quickly. 

“I was just looking through your papers. I’m allowed to look, aren’t I? Don’t I….pay for all this?” Eyvin made a vague gesture with his hands that might have been directed to the room, the Wessex College campus, the entire world? It was hard to know. 

“No, I mean, yea, I - I just…wasn’t expecting you, is all.” Erik dropped his bag slowly onto the chair. It was stupid - it was a useless gesture — but he felt a little better with two hands free. 

“Still stuttering, huh?”

Erik’s mouth shut, and he felt his face go red. 

“I’m joking, Erik,” Eyvin said, cracking a sharp smile. “Relax, for fuck’s sake.”

Erik tried to do something with his body that might look like “ _relaxed.”_ He was pretty sure it wasn’t effective. 

Eyvin was better at playing relaxed, walking around the room casually with his hands in his pockets, a curious expression on his face, as if he were simply enjoying the unexpected pleasure of running into his son in his own dorm room. This was the “good cop” schtick. Erik was very familiar with it. It could turn on a dime, he knew, but usually the worst it got was some heavy ribbing - the “ _I win when you feel as stupid as possible”_ game. 

Erik could live with that. 

“How’s Sharon?” He asked. It was better to at least start off polite. 

“Fuck Sharon,” Eyvin said. 

“Oh?” 

Eyvin’s face was curled up with the barest hint of an emotion. “It’s done with her.” 

Was that why he was here? Was he feeling….sad? _This might be uncharted territory after all_ , Erik thought. 

He said nothing. He wasn’t sure what it was safe to ask. Eyvin was nodding, his eyes distant on the corner of Erik’s bed. 

“I saw Sigefrid,” he said. “And Skade. She seems alright.” 

“Oh.” Erik had no idea what to make of this. “Yea.” 

“I mean, she seems a little…” and he made a gesture with his finger and his head, to suggest that Skade was, in fact, mental. “But Sig seems to be in control of the situation.”

“Oh. Yea.” 

“ _Oh, yea,_ ” Eyvin mocked. “Are those the only words you can say? No wonder you don’t have any friends.” 

Erik realized his mistake. His Dad had been trying to invite him into a “ _bully Sigefrid_ ” moment, with the dig on Skade. It was his attempt at rapport. But Erik had missed the opportunity, and now he was the target again. 

“Who says I don’t have any friends?” 

Eyvin just raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Erik was left to color in the lines with his own shame. 

“Sig said he tried to set you up with someone, a girl?” 

What the fuck _was_ this? Had the break with Sharon really unhinged him so much that he was here, trying to meddle in his sons’ love lives? It was fucking _weird_. But worse than that, it was unfamiliar, it was different, it was out of character for Eyvin. So Erik had no blueprint to model his responses on. 

“Yea, uh… it didn’t work out.” 

“Why? Seems like a pretty nice thing for him to do for you, don’t you think? He didn’t have to do that, you know.” 

“Yea, no, I know. I just…she was seeing someone else.” 

“Oh.” Eyvin made a face suggesting this failure was also probably due to Erik’s shortcomings. 

There was a long silence, as Eyvin looked around the room again. 

“I worry about you, Erik, you know that?”

“Yep.” It was a common refrain in their relationship. Anything could be justified by Eyvin’s “worry” for Erik. 

“You’re not like Sigefrid. You don’t know how to get what you want. You need to know how to get what you want in this world, you know that?” 

Erik might have laughed, in a different context. But the fact that 90% of what he wanted would have been possible if not for his father was a special kind of irony that held no humor for him. 

Instead he said, “Yep.” 

“You think I come around here to mess with you? You think I just wanna boss you around? No, it’s ‘cause I care about you, Erik. No one else is going to, you know that, right? No one else is gonna look after you if you don’t look after yourself.” 

“I know, Dad.” Erik looked Eyvin straight in the face. “I thank my lucky stars for you every day.” 

Eyvin wasn’t stupid. Erik sometimes wished he was, or thought he was, maybe. That was only explanation for why he said things like that, as if he could get away with them. He never got away with them. 

But it was a bit of a dare too, wasn’t it? Would Eyvin really hit his son, right here, in the middle of Wessex College student housing? That would have been a next level flex, even for him. 

Instead, Eyvin’s face flicked down to the floor, then back up to Erik. There was something sharp beneath the surface of his eyes. 

“I didn’t realize I was paying for you to take art classes,” he said. 

“What?” This seemed to come out of nowhere, and Erik could make no sense of it. 

Eyvin gestured to the shelf on Erik’s right, where a few of his pottery projects were lined up - one of his sculptures, his attempt at a vase, a bowl he was actually almost proud of. 

“You’re not paying for it,” Erik explained. “I do it on my free time. It’s just…a hobby. I’m not good at it.” 

Eyvin walked over to the bookcase. He picked up the vase, carefully, almost tenderly, turning it over in his hands, looking at it from different angles like he was assessing a fine piece of art. He put it down.

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

“Hm.” 

“Bring over the trash can,” Eyvin said, pointing to where a metal bin sat in the corner of the room. 

“What?” Erik asked again, like an idiot. 

“I said, _bring over the trash can_.” He wasn’t yelling. He almost never yelled. Eyvin was different from Sigefrid in that way. He even smiled as he said it, his eyes wide and encouraging, like they were doing something fun together, a nice father-son bonding activity. 

Erik sighed. “Right.” And he went and got the trash can. Eyvin dropped the ceramic pieces into it one at a time, tipping them off the bookshelf so that they fell and shattered in the bottom of the can. It didn’t take very long. 

“Get a new hobby,” he said, when he was done.

He left not long after that. Erik waited at the door for a while, counting to ten, then twenty, as if to be sure he was really out of the building and gone. Then he locked the door, a small, useless gesture of self-protection. It didn’t matter. It had been locked before. 

A locked door never stopped Eyvin Thurgilson. 


	3. in control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik runs into Aethelflaed at a party. He is not in control of the situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a 10k word sex scene, and by that I mean it’s 10k of pining, flirting, building sexual tension, fantasizing, self-doubting, negotiating boundaries, confirming consent, processing feelings, dredging up emotional wounds, unintentional edging, and pure smut. 
> 
> But also, like, it’s just a 10k sex scene. 
> 
> I have always written very long, drawn out angsty sex scenes, but this is absolutely a record for me. So,,,, uuuuuhhh,,,,,hope you enjoy? If this isn’t your thing, no worries. I’m sorry. It is clearly (apparently??) mine?? 
> 
> I struggled a lot with the build-up to this scene - given the perspective choices I made, I’m not sure if Aethelflaed’s experience/journey/motivation is coming through in a way that makes sense/feels natural. I always love concrit about that kind of stuff, if you have any thoughts about whether it worked or not! 
> 
> I’ve also tagged this scene as “Unsafe Sex.” It might be a bit of a stretch to call it that, but I’d rather be safe than sorry (or in this case, not.) I definitely see it as a very college-typical level of unsafe sex. 
> 
> Also, yes, yes, I did watch Bridgerton around the time I was drafting this scene. In case you were wondering. (also, in case you were wondering, yes, this is entirely consensual.) 
> 
> CWs: Alcohol Use, Explicit Sex, Oral Sex, Unsafe Sex

The text came in at 5:15. 

**_Party at Aylesbury House tonight. Sigtryggr and I are going. Wanna come with?_**

The message was from Stiorra, one of the casual friends that Aethelflaed had picked up during her fling with Uhtred. Stiorra was serious and sporty - she was very intense about her place on the Women’s Soccer team - but she also knew how to have a good time. Aethelflaed had never known a girl as small as her to be able to hold her drink quite so well. It was a little frightening, really. 

Aethelflaed sifted through her other options for the evening. She could go over to Iseult’s, maybe. But she’d been there two evenings already that week, and she was very conscious of not over-extending herself into Iseult and Hild’s relationship. They didn’t party much - definitely not at places like Aylesbury House - and would likely be having a cozy night in together. Probably better not to intrude. 

Aethelflaed no longer partied and binged the way she had in freshman year. She had outgrown that around the time she’d outgrown Aethelred. But she also didn’t mind an excuse to get out sometimes, to meet new people, to push herself just a little outside her comfort zone. There was a thrill to it — a sort of power that came with feeling good in yourself, in knowing you looked good, in moving through the world knowing that others might know it, too. 

**_Sure_** , she texted back. **_Sounds good_. **

The response came swiftly. Stiorra was effortlessly enthusiastic about most things, and Aethelflaed liked that about her. 

**_Great. Meet at my room at 9 to pre-game._**

It wasn’t even a question. Aethelflaed just hoped she’d be able to keep up. 

Stiorra greeted her with a bright smile and a half hug, a tallboy of Natty already clasped in one hand. 

“Welcome, welcome!” She said cheerfully. Her long brown hair was tied up in a sleek, high ponytail, and she had drawn her eyes with a flawlessly executed winged liner style. Her outfit — a loose blouse over a kilt-style miniskirt — was somehow both preppy and chic. 

“You look fucking gorgeous,” Stiorra said, taking in Aethelflaed’s own array. 

“Thanks,” she said, smoothing down her high-waisted corduroy skirt. “I try.” 

“Come in, come in!” Stiorra gestured her into the room, where her boyfriend Sigtryggr lounged on the bed with his shoes off, his long legs crossed over each other and his hands pillowed behind his head. 

They were a funny pair, Aethelflaed thought. If Stiorra was high-prep in the most earnest sort of way, Sigtryggr was full-on hippie, with his long hair and his oversized band T-shirts and the vague scent of Patchouli that followed him around wherever he went. But they really seemed to work. They balanced each other out, Aethelflaed thought. 

“Hey, Aethelflaed,” Sigtryggr said, raising his chin in casual greeting. Aethelflaed responded in kind and settled down in the room’s single chair while Stiorra flitted around, telling a story about some girl on her soccer team’s shitty boyfriend.

Sigtryggr leaned over to silently offer her a sip from his flask. He clearly didn’t want to interrupt Stiorra’s story with the moment, so Aethelflaed accepted with a silent smile of gratitude and smelled the edge of it. _Gin_. She took one burning, acrid sip and swallowed quickly, then handed it back to him. 

She didn’t really know him - not as well as she knew Stiorra, and even that was just a casual relationship at best. But Aethelflaed liked him - he had a steady sort of presence, a powerful quietness that she found calming to be around. She had run into him one time after class, not long after meeting him, and he had walked her all the way back to her dorm, just because. It hadn’t felt flirtatious or weird, it had just felt friendly. Aethelflaed remembered that with fondness. 

She felt her ears grow a little hot at the memory now — but it wasn’t because of Sigtryggr, no…..

No, that had been the time she’d seen Erik. The only time she’d seen him, all semester — the only time she’d seen him at all since last Spring, when they’d run into each other outside the library. He’d been across the quad, walking in a slightly different direction, but she had known it was him - the brightness of his blond head, the blue-gray flannel he wore, his funny slouching walk, like he was trying to make his body smaller than it was. She had gotten flustered at the sight at him and had turned to Sigtryggr, speaking with more emphasis, and when she glanced back, Erik had stopped. She thought he might have seen her, too. 

But they were too far away to acknowledge each other, and the whole thing would probably have been awkward anyway, right? So she turned away again and didn’t look back, and she tried not to think about it at all on the way to her dorm. 

She had thought about it later, though. What if they’d been closer? What if they’d spoken to each other? Would he think she was dating Sigtryggr? She _had_ been seeing Uhtred at the time, but she wouldn’t have wanted Erik to know that, for some reason. 

Sometimes, Aethelflaed imagined him witnessing her in intimate moments of her life - this was weird, she knew this, but it happened regardless. When she was alone with someone, or having fun with a group of friends, believing herself in good spirits, believing that she belonged, she might hear his voice: _Is that actually real though? Do they really know you?_

And she would answer in her head, _Who are you? You didn’t know me. We spent one weekend together having sex. Is that usually how you get to know people?_

And the bright mood would pass, and she would feel sour and alone. 

She knew this wasn’t really him. This was her. This was the voice in her head trying to remind her when she was faking, when she was pretending to belong, like she had done for months and months with Aethelred. It just felt like Erik. And it sounded like him, and it made her remember what it had felt like to be with him, and that was a tender, aching kind of feeling that was hard to ignore.

But it wasn’t actually him. She knew this. 

“So anyway, we got the girls together and snuck into his dorm room and poured gasoline over all of his clothes, so hopefully he learned his lesson.” 

“I’m sorry…. _what?_ ” Aethelflaed asked, startled out of her thought. 

Stiorra turned, her face carefully blank. “What?” 

“ _Whose_ clothes did you cover in gasoline?” 

“The…the fucking guy. Have you even been listening?” 

“Yea, I mean…I zoned out a bit, but..” 

Stiorra rolled her eyes. “Well, just take my word for it. He deserved it.” 

“He did,” Sigtryggr confirmed. 

“See?” Stiorra said. “Even Siggy agrees, so you know it’s true.” 

Aethelflaed had to laugh at that. 

“Well.” Stiorra gave a decisive look between the two of them. “You ready to go?” 

Sigtryggr rolled himself off the bed with cat-like agility and quickly started pulling on his boots. Aethelflaed stood and glanced in Stiorra’s long mirror. It was a bit of a funny outfit she’d worn - fancier than usual for some odd reason. It had been a while since she’d been to a big party like this, maybe that was why. But still, she thought she looked nice. 

She _did_ look nice, she said to herself, reframing the words. And she would have fun tonight. And maybe she would meet someone new, someone she liked, and they would hit it off, and it would be good. It would be everything she’d been hoping for in a relationship, and she would be in control of her emotions, and she wouldn’t be faking anything. Maybe that would happen. Why shouldn’t it? She belonged with these people. She belonged here. 

She waited, and she didn’t hear any voice.

The text came around 6, from Dagfinn. 

**_Aylesbury House? Tonight?_**

Dagfinn was one of the only guys Erik still hung out with from the Beomfleot Hall crew from freshman year. They got on, Erik thought, in the casual, shallow sort of way of guys who didn’t actually spend much time talking to each other. But there was a comfort in that. Sometimes it was just nice to go to a party and play beer pong and get a little too drunk and not care. Mostly it was just nice to go to parties that weren’t thrown by Sigefrid. Erik would have hung out with almost anyone under those circumstances, he thought. 

**_Yea_** , he texted back. **_Meet you there at…9?_**

**_Yup._ **

Simple, uncomplicated Dagfinn. 

Erik smiled to himself. He could do with a simple, uncomplicated night. 

The party was already in full swing when Erik arrived. Students drifted across the lawn towards the wide doorway and clustered in the vestibule, forcing him to turn sideways just so he could push past them into the open first floor lounge. The sound of a deep, thudding bass line echoed from somewhere below Erik’s feet, and he realized the real party was happening in the basement. That’s where he found Dagfinn a few minutes later, already dominating the beer pong table with careless cockiness.

“Duuuuuude!” Dagfinn offered in greeting, clasping Erik’s hand with a universally bro-ish gesture. “Sorry, we already started the game. You can get in next round?” 

“No worries, man. I’ll find something to drink.” 

Then there was another uncomfortable, jostling walk to the other basement room, where some guys were filling solo cups from a keg. Erik waited in line to get one, recognizing a pretty red-haired girl from one of his business classes in line a few steps ahead of him. He smiled and nodded at her, but she just looked at him as if she was uncertain where she knew him from and uncertain whether she wanted to know. Erik covered the moment with a cough and looked away. 

Then, back to the pong table, watching Dagfinn play as he sipped thin, shitty beer out of his cup. Erik looked around the room, trying very hard not to regret coming in the first place. 

That’s when he saw her. 

He looked down into his cup for a few long moments, watching the little blobs of foam float across the surface. He counted to five, and then looked back up. She was still there. 

Aethelflaed looked dangerously pretty. Not dangerous to herself - no, she was confident and collected. Erik could see that, even from across the room. 

No, it was dangerous to _him_ , how nice she looked, dangerous to his welfare, dangerous to the idea of himself he clung to - that he was somehow in control of his own emotions. 

Aethelflaed hadn’t noticed him, so Erik looked away, back to the pong table where Dagfinn was currently clearing the opponent’s cups with perfectly leveled shots. But that didn’t really work, because then he was just thinking about her, behind him, out of sight, wondering what her body was doing, wondering whether she’d moved away yet to some other part of the party. 

After another long moment, Erik turned back to look at her. He was afraid that she would disappear, vanishing into the crowd, and he wouldn’t see her again — maybe ever. But she was still there, standing with a few friends near the coat-pile couch. She had taken off her jacket, exposing the long lines of her arms, the naked skin of her neck. She was wearing a brown skirt that stretched from the narrow point of her waist down to her knees, with black tights underneath. Her shirt was light colored, small and tight-fitting and tucked into the waist of her skirt, with thin straps hooked over her shoulders. It had some weird structure to it, almost like an old-fashioned corset but not quite. Erik could see the shape of it where it traced the curve under her breasts. 

One of her friends leaned in close — a small, brown-haired girl — whispering something against the side of her face, and then Aethelflaed turned to look at him, her eyes wide with a question, the half curve of a smile on her mouth. Erik’s stomach dropped, coming to rest uncomfortably close to his groin. He’d been so busy noticing her, he hadn’t noticed that he’d been noticed in return. But it was too late now. 

He gave an awkward wave, and she smiled again, then turned back to her friend. He released a breath and turned away himself, looking back at Dagfinn who had just won his game. It was done, it was over, they had acknowledged each other, and now Erik would not look at her again. It was embarrassing enough to have been caught once. 

“You want to take my place?” Dagfinn was asking. 

“Hmm?” 

“At the table. I’m getting bored of winning.” 

Erik laughed. “You’re such a shit, Dagfinn.” 

“No, just an excellent beer pong player.” 

“Ha. Yea….uh, sure. I’ll take a turn,” Erik said, even though he found he didn’t really care about playing. It would be a good distraction though. But then he felt a hand on his shoulder, very quick and light, like a bird touching down a branch and then leaving again. He turned to see Aethelflaed looking up at him, a shy, self-effacing smile on her face. 

“Hey,” she said. 

“Maybe next round then?” Dagfinn asked, catching Erik’s eye with a meaningful look. 

“Sure, yea.” Erik nodded at him, and Dagfinn clapped him on the shoulder with a level of force that felt pointed. 

“Hi,” Erik said to Aethelflaed, moving a bit away from the table, closer to the wall. 

She leaned up against it with a casual, almost easeful posture and tossed her head so that the loose strands of her half-tied hair fell down her back. She looked different, Erik thought, and then he realized she’d gotten bangs since he’d last seen her. They suited her face, as did the bright lipstick she was wearing, and her eyes…she’d done something to her eyes that made them look big and dark and bright in the room’s low light. 

“You’re looking well,” he said, a bit unthinkingly. 

“Thanks.” She smiled. “You too.” 

Erik thought it very unlikely that he was looking well like she was looking well, but he smiled at the courtesy all the same.

“I still have your flannel,” she said, affecting an easy, casual tone. “And your t-shirt. I’m sorry I never gave them back.” 

“It’s okay. I’ve…I’ve got more flannels, and t-shirts for that matter.” He gestured to his torso, to the gray t-shirt and blue tartan flannel that was practically his uniform. “You can keep them. I mean — if you want to. You don’t have to.” 

She laughed. “No, I’ll keep them. It’s a nice flannel.” 

And Erik had a flash of an image, of her wearing his flannel, his T-shirt. The t-shirt would be too big for her to wear in everyday life, he knew. Maybe she slept in it. He let out a shallow breath.   
She was standing very close, he realized. It was impossible to have a conversation if you weren’t standing close, in the ruckus of the party. But the angles of their bodies - his height on her - made it so he could see down the front of her shirt just a bit. He could see the curve of her shirt where it met her breast and then dipped in tight against her sternum. He could see she wasn’t wearing a bra. 

He looked away, hoping she hadn’t noticed him looking at her chest. But the next imagining came too strongly to deflect. Erik saw himself pulling down one strap of the shirt so that it fell off her shoulder, then sliding his hand in against her skin. Then his other hand, up her skirt, tracing the seam of her tights until he reached the seam of her body. He would hold his hands there, looking at her face, watching her eyelids flutter and her mouth ease open. And then he would lean in, close to her ear and whisper the words. _You’re mine_ , he would say. _You belong to me_. 

Erik took a step back, rolling away from her on the wall. He ran a hand through his hair and then adjusted the waistband of his pants to relieve the pressure there. 

“How are your classes going?” He said, with a note of forced urgency. “Anything good?” 

“Yea.” She bit her lip, cocked her head. Why was she doing that? He was trying to talk about classes so she wouldn’t look at him like that, so he wouldn’t think about her mouth on his skin or his hands on her body. “Umm…I’m taking a 200-level Gov class that I like. Odda’s always great. Alfred’s 19th-century Lit Class was full, unfortunately. You know I like my 19th century writers.”

“Yea.” That didn’t help either, cause now all he could think about was fucking her after reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry out loud on his bed.   
“What about you? Anything you like?”

“Um….” Erik had forgotten momentarily what they were talking about. “Yea, I…uh…I did my Environmental Science pre-req last year, so now I get to take a full Oceanography class. We get to go out on field trips to the shore and everything. We went on a boat a couple weeks ago.” 

“That sounds really nice.” 

“It is. And uhhh…” He rifled through his mind. It was getting a bit easier, he was almost back down on Earth. “Some business classes, but that’s just boring shit. And a Medieval History class. That’s my elective.” 

Aethelflaed bit her lip again, then slid her tongue over the bottom edge of her front teeth. Her lipstick was a little smudged now, but it did nothing to lessen the perfection of her face. 

“You know, you’re supposed to take something easy as an elective. Not a Medieval History class.” 

“Yea, well I thought it would be fun. Warriors, and battles, you know, like…fantasy stuff. Turns out, it’s mostly just about the Church.” 

Aethelflaed laughed. “Yea, that doesn’t surprise me. Probably a let down though.” 

“It’s actually not too bad. Those Popes were some wild motherfuckers, let me tell you.” 

Aethelflaed laughed again. Erik wasn’t thinking about her breasts anymore, but he was thinking about the feeling of making her laugh, the flush of satisfaction that came from knowing he had pleased or surprised her. It wasn’t exactly an improvement over the earlier situation. 

And then she looked up at him, her eyes soft beneath her eyelashes, and the sight of it hit him very hard, low like a punch in his belly. She was close again. She had broached the distance that he had put between them in an effort to curb his arousal. 

And that’s when Erik realized he was completely and utterly fucked. 

He was not in control of this situation. 

“It’s really nice to see you, Erik,” she said, her voice quiet so he had to lean even further in to hear it. 

“Yea, it is,” he agreed. It was a little more than nice, he thought, or a little different. It was nice like a too-hot shower was nice, the water burning into his skin until he was red and raw. It was nice like a high after a headache - the relief sweet and heavy and fleeting. 

Aethelflaed’s chest was caved in a bit now, her shoulders curling forward, her arms wrapped around herself below her breasts. It pushed the stiff fabric of her shirt off of her skin, leaving a gap between her body and the shirt, and Erik could see…he could see everything. God, did she know…? Was she doing that on purpose? 

The thought that she might have been made his mouth go dry. 

Erik lifted his hand quickly, before he could second guess the motion. He touched her, very lightly, where the strap of her shirt met her skin, sliding his thumb over it and tracing it down her back. The tips of his fingers grazed her shoulder blade. Then he let his hand fall. 

It was just a gesture - a test, a question. Something he hoped could be ignored if she wanted to ignore it. 

But Erik heard a little intake of breath into her throat, and then her hand was against his own where it hung at his side. She didn’t hold his hand, she just touched it, curling her fingers against his palm. Then she leaned her face close to his chest. He didn’t move. He thought she might’ve been smelling him, and he was very glad he had showered that afternoon. 

A group of loud boys walked by them, jostling the space with their bodies and their boisterous energy, and Aethelflaed pulled away. Their hands fell apart and she rolled back on the wall like he had done before. Erik let out a breath and touched the waist of his jeans again. He hoped she didn’t notice when he slid his hand quickly beneath his belt to adjust himself. 

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. 

“Oh, yea, okay.” It was almost a relief, to know the tension of the moment would be over, to know he could stop worrying about controlling his erection in front of a woman who he very much did _not_ want to feel weird around him. 

She said, “I’ll see you in a bit,” which felt like a strange thing to say. Would she? Erik thought the encounter was over. But then she tossed a look over her shoulder as she walked away, and it was…..well, it was A Look. That’s the only way Erik could describe it. It was a look that meant something, he was certain. He just wasn’t sure what. 

She was disappearing now into the crowd, and Erik started to think he might have imagined it - the look, the whole encounter even. He turned back to the pong table, a little dazed, and Dagfinn looked at him questioningly. 

“You want a turn now?” 

“Um…maybe?” Erik’s eyes were a bit unfocused, zoned out on the sight of a single red solo cup as he played the moment over again in his mind. The closeness, his hand on her shoulder, the smelling, _I’ll see you in a bit_ , The Look. 

“Dude?” Dagfinn was looking at him again. 

“Uh…sorry, um….I think…I think I gotta go. Uh…later, maybe?” Erik turned, feeling drunker than he thought he actually was. Then he pushed through the crowd, out into a corridor near the staircase. 

He stopped a girl walking past him. “Are there bathrooms down here?” 

“No,” she said. “They’re on the first floor.” 

He took the stairs two at a time, emerging out in a first floor hallway. It was less crowded up here, but there were still clumps of people, clustered in corners, talking and laughing and drinking. He took a right, down a hall where it looked like some people were lined up and waiting for the bathroom. 

That’s about when he started to feel like a fucking creep. He had _followed_ her, he had followed up here _to the bathroom_ , like a complete fucking lunatic. Like a predator. She’d just wanted to go to the bathroom, not be hunted like an animal. 

He turned away from the hallway, suddenly confused and ashamed, and made to head back to the stairs. But then Aethelflaed was there, next to him, leaning against the wall as if…as if she’d been waiting for him. 

She smiled when his eyes found her, and then pushed herself off the wall and came a little closer to him. 

“I didn’t —” he said. “I wasn’t sure, um…” He noticed that her face looked a little different. She’d rubbed her lipstick off. It was done well - he wouldn’t have even known she’d been wearing it if he hadn’t just seen her. Which meant she’d probably done it on purpose. The thought gave him a little courage. “Did you want me to follow you?” 

“Erik…” She looked down at the floor, almost sheepish. 

_Oh God._ “…Did you… _not_ want me to follow you?”

“No…I did.” Her eyes slid back to his face. “I know I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry, I just…” 

He stepped a little closer to her body so they were nestled more into the dark corner of the room. “Why did you want me to follow you?” He said, and he looked down at her chest, very openly this time, and then up to her lips, and then her eyes. He thought it might tell her what he was thinking of doing before he did it, in case she didn’t want him to. 

And she looked down at him too, down at his body, her eyes lingering on his waistband, as if she knew he’d been stiff for her since the moment she’d come close to him in the basement.

“Why do you think?” 

Erik pressed her against the wall and brought his hands up to her face. She laughed, and he could smell her breath like mint and vodka. “This is a bad idea,” he said. 

She did that look again, the one with her eyes wide and soft and her eyelashes heavy. Her mouth was open now, her lips just a little wet. “Don’t do it then,” she said. 

He kissed her urgently, because of course he was going to do it. She wanted him to do it, and he would have done whatever she wanted him to do. He would have thrown himself into the river if she told him to. Hadn’t he always been lost to her pleasure? To her will? 

She was kissing him back, very deeply, and standing up on her toes so that her hips could come closer to leveling with his own. He helped her, hooking one hand under her thigh and lifting her a little higher, then pinning her there with the force of his body. 

“You don’t have to do this,” she said quietly, their mouths still close. “Just ‘cause I…summoned you up here —”

“You think I don’t wanna do this?” He said, breathless. “You think I haven’t been thinking about this since I first saw you, thinking about —”

And then he did it, because he could. He pulled one strap down over her shoulder and slid his hand into her shirt, holding her breast with firm pressure. He could put the other one under her skirt, even while he pinned her there. It was a little awkward, but he could reach all the way up to the center of her, sliding his thumb over the seam of her tights. Then he leaned his head back and looked at her. 

Her mouth _was_ open, just like he’d imagined, her eyelids fluttering closed as her eyes rolled back at the feeling of his hands on her. 

“Erik —” she said. Her neck arched, pressing her head back into the wall. 

_You’re mine. You belong to me_. He didn’t say that. He’d only said it before because she’d asked him to, and that had been a game, or something like one. 

But he did think it to himself, as he touched her and watched her face. _You’re mine,_ he thought, and opened his hand, rubbing the heel of his palm against the most tender part of her. She gasped and arched closer into him. _You belong to me_. Maybe it was bad of him to even think it. He wasn’t sure. 

“Erik?” Her mouth was warm on the side of his face, her hands gripped tight around his shoulders. He hadn’t even noticed her touching him, he’d been thinking so much about touching her. 

“Yea?” 

“Would you fuck me here, against this wall? If I wanted you to?” 

_I’ll do anything you want me to_. He might’ve said that, he wanted to say that, it was almost hot on his lips. But it wasn’t really true, was it? He wouldn’t hurt her, not really - being rough and hard wasn’t quite the same as that. He wouldn’t hit her, not even if she begged him to. He didn’t think he could ever do that. And he couldn’t keep her. Even if she wanted to belong to him. 

Erik cooled a bit at the thought - the dangerous recklessness of his passion, the promise almost made that he might not have been able to fill. 

He eased back from her body, unwinding his hands from inside her clothes, then smoothing them down over the edges of her skirt to neaten her again. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” he said. 

“Oh.” Her face was falling. She was trying to control it, he could tell. She was trying to pretend she didn’t care that he’d just put his hand up her skirt and then gone cold, like a complete jackass. 

“I mean, maybe we should go somewhere else…like upstairs or something. Somewhere more private?” 

Her gaze flickered on him, a little hopeful, a little rough around the edges. “Only if you want to,” she said. 

Why did she keep saying that? As if he didn’t want her, as if he wouldn’t get down on his knees right here, and push her skirt up, and put his tongue inside of her if he could. But he couldn’t do that. He looked around, a bit warily, framing her body with his own against the wall, as if he could shield her from view. 

“I…just don’t want to be seen, by anyone who might…” 

By anyone who might take the story back to Sigefrid _…_ by anyone who might even know Sigefrid, or Skade, or any of the other people who haunted his life. The people who would destroy any good thing that ever happened to him, just by their nature, without even trying, like a boot crushing an ant. 

But Erik didn’t even want to say their names, as if he might summon them just with the sound. 

“You live here?” She asked, tucking her hair down with a self-conscious gesture. “You have a room upstairs?” 

“No. I don’t live here…”

“Oh. Me neither.” 

They looked at each other for a bit, or rather, they looked a little off each other, only half meeting their eyes. There was the unspoken thing - should they leave, should they go to one of their rooms? But then what? There would the long walk across campus in the cold, their bodies chilling in the night until they remembered why this was a thing that should not happen, that could not happen. And Erik didn’t want…. 

“I’m sorry,” Aethelflaed was saying. She was leaned against the wall, still sheltered by his body, and he moved closer so he could touch her, curling his hand around the back of her shoulder. It felt important to keep touching, or else it might go cold between them, even right here, without going anywhere. 

Erik desperately did not want it to go cold. 

“Why are you sorry?” 

“I don’t know…I feel…” She closed her eyes, wincing slightly. “I feel like I’m…seducing you or something. Like I’m tempting you to do something bad.” 

“You are,” he said, and she opened her eyes in surprise and laughed. 

“You’re not supposed to say that!” 

“What am I supposed to say?” He was drawing closer to her again, so their bodies were just inches apart. He couldn’t help it, he was like the tide, pulled inexorably up the sand. “Tell me, and I’ll say it.” 

She let out a little breath, like a moan or a sigh. Erik felt it more than he heard it. 

“Tell me you’ve wanted this, too,” she said, very quietly. 

“Aethelflaed, I —” What could he say? That he hadn’t had sex with anyone since he’d been inside of her? That hers was the body that rode him in his dreams? That she was the one person who hadn’t made him feel lonely? 

He didn’t say those things. 

He slid his hand down her arm, all the way to her own hand, taking it gently. And then he pulled it towards himself, across the few inches that parted them and placed it on the front of his pants. He let his hand fall, so she could pull away if she wanted, but she didn’t, and he swallowed at the feeling of her touching him, even through the thick denim fabric.

“I want this, Aethelflaed,” he said. “I want you so much.” 

She whimpered a little, and then she moved quickly, so fast that it caught him by surprise. She put her hand down the front of his pants, under his belt, under the band of his boxers, so that he felt her touching him, skin to skin, her hand curling and gripping around him in a soft, sliding way. 

Erik’s knees might have buckled at the feeling of it, but he grabbed the back of her shoulders with both his hands, bracing himself against her. 

“Aethelflaed —!” 

She took her hand out, and the loss of it left him feeling almost sweaty and sick. She looked at him, like she wanted to say something but she was biting her tongue. 

She was waiting for him. 

“Will you come upstairs with me?” He asked. 

She nodded once, a firm, decided gesture, and Erik felt like something formal — almost binding — had passed between them. They would do this, and they would stop doubting it and questioning it as it happened. 

It was going to happen. 

Erik turned, taking her hand and leading her towards the main staircase of Aylesbury House. The house was an old Victorian mansion, acquired by the college sometime in the 90s for overflow student housing. It needed a lot of work, but instead of actually doing the work, Wessex had just slapped some EXIT signs over the doors, and some fire extinguishers on the walls, and those little placards that go next the bathrooms, and then called it a dorm. It still had the feeling of a house, rambling and a bit run-down, with little alcoves and side chambers and dusty closets hiding in every corner. 

Erik took the stairs quickly, feeling exposed on the long ascent up the open bannisters, and a little desperate, too, to feel Aethelflaed’s body pressed against his own again soon. Her hand was still inside of his as she trailed one step behind him, the sound of her footfalls an echo to his own. They emerged soon onto the empty second floor, and Erik was relieved, until he realized the layout. 

Unlike the first floor, it seemed like every alcove, every side closet, and probably every window seat too, had been converted to an actual bedroom, leaving only a long, straight stretch of carpeted hallway with a dissonant, institutional feel. There were even fluorescent lights on the ceiling, and one flickered disconcertingly over them. 

“This….isn’t great, huh?” Aethelflaed said, beside him. Her hand had come up a bit to grasp his elbow, her fingers curling around his arm in a tight squeezing motion that sent him spinning a bit. He felt it as the memory of her hand down his pants. He felt it like an actual pulse in his groin. He pulled her close, pressing their fronts together, hungry for the contact.

“Maybe the third floor is better?” 

The staircase wrapped around, doubling back on itself to reach up to the next level, and it was Aethelflaed that pulled him this time, leading him up the stairs. This meant that Erik was left to watch her, the straps of her shirt sliding over her shoulder blades as she moved, the fabric of her skirt shifting, and then bunching up as she took the next step…

The third floor was better. There were only a few rooms, and some storage closets, and then…at the back…a blessed alcove, hidden from view by the knee-walled rail of a small staircase that went up to the attic. They didn’t talk about it, they just moved there, as if on instinct, and when they got into the corner of it, Aethelflaed put her back to the wall and pulled Erik into her without speaking. 

There weren’t any questions left to ask, not to each other, but Erik had much to consider. What part of her did he want to touch first, skin to skin, like she had done to him? What piece of clothing did he want to take off, revealing the shape of her body underneath it? He thought maybe her shirt - he would pull it down to her waist, leaving her breasts naked. There were only two little straps stopping him now. His hands were already holding her there through the fabric of her shirt as he kissed her. 

But she moved on him first. She unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, and then pulledhim out into her hand without stopping. Erik was almost paralyzed by the feeling. Her hand was tight around him, moving with rhythmic urgency, and he had to grip the edge of the stair wall, where it stretched up above his head. She wasn’t teasing him, or touching him just to call something else into happening. She was giving him a full-on handjob, right here, in the far corner of Aylesbury House. 

“Aethelflaed…” It felt so good, so intense, like every part of him existed at the spot where she was touching him, and only there. But then the feeling started to shift, as the skin tugged painfully against her hand with its own dryness. 

He didn’t say anything, but she must have realized it too, because she was getting down on her knees in front of him, still cradled between his legs and the wall and then she was… 

_Oh, god._ “Aethelflaed!” He said again, almost a reprimand. This isn’t why he’d brought her up here, not so he could fuck her mouth against a wall. He had wanted to pleasure _her_ , he had wanted _his mouth_ on _her_. But now she was pulling his hips closer to her face, as if she wanted him to push deeper into her throat, as if she wanted him to use her like this, to overtake her with his need. 

So he put his hand into her hair and let her stroke him with her tongue and let her give him the fullness of her mouth. He pressed his forehead against the cheap wood paneling and looked down at her. She was looking up at him in return, her eyes wide, and she moaned at the sight of his face. He could feel it in her throat, because he was in her throat, too, and the feeling moved through his entire body, buzzing like a swarm of bees. 

“Aethelflaed.” He heard his own breath, loud and staggered, like he was about to have a panic attack. And she moaned again, and it rushed through him like a spear, and he had pull out, quickly and desperately, before he came. He’d had no idea — not even the vaguest conception — that something like this was going to happen to him tonight. If he had, he might have masturbated, discharging some of his own urgency so he could be ready to be slow and steady and intentional. 

But he hadn’t done that, and now it was all rushing to the tip of him, and he barely stopped it in time. He was mostly just grateful he hadn’t accidentally come all over her face. 

“Aethelflaed,” he said again, feeling like this was the only word available to him anymore, like all the rest had taken a vacation from his brain. 

She was struggling up to her feet, and he wanted to help her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t touch her, or feel one of her hands tight around any part of him. He rolled away a bit, giving her space, giving himself a breath. 

Aethelflaed smiled at him, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, and this did not help. “Are you okay?” She asked. 

“Yea,” he said. He felt suddenly aware and self conscious of the fact that his dick was still out, aggressively hard. He tucked it back into his boxers. “I just need a minute,” he said. She nodded. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said. “I wanted you to come.”

“Stop.” Erik tried to smile as another painful wave shot through him. “You’re not allowed to say that to me right now.” 

She laughed. They stood side by side for a long moment, backs against the wall, until Erik started to feel himself cool a bit. He pulled her a little closer, so that she was nestled against his side. Then he turned his face and started to kiss her neck slowly, until she groaned. 

“What do you want now, Aethelflaed?” He asked, against her skin. Her hands snaked around his back to hold him close to her. 

“Will you fuck me? Now that we’re up here?” 

Erik groaned into her neck, sliding his hands down over her butt, then back up into her skirt. He felt like he could contain himself now, the surge had settled back somewhere in the core of him. But then he was hit was a cascade of disappointment, a rippling, falling feeling of almost bitter regret. 

“I don’t — ” He pulled away to look at her. “Aethelflaed, I don’t have a condom. I’m so sorry, I forgot, I didn’t even think — do you have one?” He asked, hopefully.

Her eyes were shifting back and forth, as if in thought. “No,” she said. 

“Fuck.” Erik let his head roll back against the wall and then drove his skull into it a few more times, in frustration. “Fuck fuck fuck.” How had he not thought about this until now? It was as if his brain had left the building, leaving only…well, leaving something else in its place. 

Erik looked back at her face. “But I could make you come…with my hands, or my mouth,” he offered. 

“Really?” She asked, almost startled. 

“Of course. Why not?” Hadn’t she just done the same for him? Or tried to? But she’d always been a little more self-conscious with her own body, Erik remembered that. 

She spoke the words in a whisper. “You’d go down on me, right here?” 

It was all the invitation Erik needed. He pressed her back into the wall, falling down onto his knees and sliding his hands up under her skirt, so it bunched around her waist. Then he pulled her tights down over her hips, sliding one side of the thin black fabric all the way down to her ankle. She had kicked off her flats, so he could pull it off her foot, letting the tights dangle from her other leg, leaving her thighs free and able to be pressed open. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. 

He touched her, just with the tip of his tongue, and she gasped out his name.

“Erik!” He remembered before, when he couldn’t say anything but “ _Aethelflaed”_ over and over. He wanted to make her say his name again. He hooked the back of her thighs over his shoulders so that she sat, propped up on the wall by his body. She wrapped her calves around him, crossing her ankles on his back, and his hands came up to hold her butt, keeping her supported and safe. 

And then Erik kissed her, putting his mouth to the tenderest part of her, letting his tongue slide inside of her until he heard her whimper and moan. She was very slick, and he liked the taste of her - he knew that was weird maybe, but he didn’t care. He liked everything about it, the feeling of pleasuring her, the feeling of devoting all of himself to her, to her body, to her need. He wanted her to ride his face, to grind into him with her hips, and she did. She grasped his head and pushed against him, and his arm was tight on her back, helping her, fixing her close to his mouth. 

“Erik!” She said again, and he wanted to touch her, to bring his hand around and put his fingers inside of her. But his hands were needed to support her body, and so he hoped his mouth was enough — enough to make her come, enough to make her cry out and twist her hands into his hair until it hurt. 

But she was pushing him away, falling off of his shoulders and away from his face, and then she was kneeling in front of him so that their heads were level. They crouched together, close in the corner. 

“Erik,” she said. “You should fuck me now. Please.” 

He didn’t understand. “Aethelflaed, I —”

“I’m on birth control,” she said. “I’m on birth control, and I — ” she looked away from his face, as if the words felt a little awkward on her tongue. “I got a test recently, for STIs? We can have sex, Erik. It’s okay.” 

“Aethelflaed.” Erik was torn, so deeply hungry to give her what she wanted and so deeply reluctant to do something she would regret. “I’ve….never had a test like that, Aethelflaed. I’m sorry.” 

“Oh.” Her face was falling again, like it had before, on the first floor, when she thought he was denying her what she wanted, and the sight of it twisted into him. He cursed every single part of himself for every single thing he had fucked up in bringing them to this moment. 

“Let me make you come,” he said, a bit desperately, like a plea. 

“But if I’m clean,” she was saying, still bargaining. “And we had sex….” 

“But we used condoms that whole time, Aethelflaed. I don’t know if it works like —” 

“And you’ve used condoms, with all the people you’ve slept with since then?”

_With all the people he’d slept with?_ He almost laughed. It was like she knew, like she was goading him into speaking the truth. 

Erik swallowed, leaning back from her and looking down at his own legs to avoid her eyes. “I…uh. I haven’t been with anyone else. Since you. You’re the last person I slept with.” 

Aethelflaed was still and silent for what felt like a long time. “Oh,” she said finally, and Erik had no idea what this meant. “Erik, I….I think it’s okay. I mean, I’m okay with it. If you are. I want —”

“Aethelflaed —”

“I’m not trying to pressure you, or anything. It’s…your choice.” 

Pressure - is that what he was feeling? Pressure to please her, pressure to give her what she wanted? No, that came from him. It was a desire as close to him as his own breath. And then the physical pressure inside of him, building hot and thick and heavy, at the thought of being inside of her, completely naked against the warmth of her. 

_That_ was what she wanted. 

“I’ve never had sex without a condom before,” he said, and she nodded, saying nothing, as if wanting to give him the space to make his own choice. She was looking up at the ceiling with an innocent, almost idle expression. 

“I wonder what’s up there,” she said casually, nodding to the trap door at the top of the little staircase they were currently nested behind. 

Erik licked his lips, took a breath. “Do you want to find out?” 

She gave him a taut, meaningful look, her eyes bright and excited. They both knew what this meant. 

They stood together. Erik’s pants were still open. He zipped the jeans but left the belt unbuckled, and Aethelflaed stripped off the other leg of her tights, collecting them and her shoes into a neat pile in her hands. Erik walked up first and gave a testing push to the door. It swung up easily, and it wasn’t hard to pull himself through the opening. He turned back to give Aethelflaed a hand, and then shut the door behind them. 

The attic was big and dark and dusty. There was a bit of light filtering in from a lamppost that stood outside one of the round glass windows the peppered the walls, but it still took Erik’s eyes a moment to adjust. It seemed like it was mostly student storage - old pieces of furniture and boxes were arranged into haphazard piles. There was one corner filled with rusty broken bikes, and another where it appeared a student had set up and then abandoned a home-made beer-brewing rig. 

In the far back of the room, someone had created a little lounge, with a faded couch and a coffee table, half blocked from the rest of the space by a hanging tapestry. Aethelflaed gave Erik a speculative look. 

“Vaguely sketchy, no?” She said, nodding at the dusty couch. 

He laughed. She was holding his hand as they stood there together, looking around the room. It felt very tender and intimate to him, almost more intimate than the feeling of her hand down his pants had felt, in a strange way. It wasn’t for the sake of sex that she touched him now, just for the sake of closeness. 

“I’ll risk it,” Erik said. And that was the truth of it all, wasn’t it? He would’ve risked anything for her in that moment. Even the wholeness of his own heart. 

She smiled almost shyly, and then they were walking over to the couch and sinking down onto it together. Erik slid his feet out of his boots, and then took off his flannel, feeling the air of the attic press in on him in a warm, stuffy way. His socked feet scuffed against the dusty floorboards. Aethelflaed leaned back, spreading her arms wide, as if in triumph. 

“A private room after all,” she said. “Look at us.” Erik laughed, and he did look at her. Her hair was messy, her eye makeup a bit smudged. One strap of her shirt had fallen over her shoulder. He felt an ache — not in his groin, but in his chest. 

It was like a hand squeezing all the breath from his lungs very tightly, and he was back in his room with her, all those months ago, watching her face as she laughed or she talked, or she came. He had been reckless for her then, reckless like a speeding car, rushing to a crash. And it hadn’t worked. 

It had just left them both damaged on the road. 

“Were you…waiting for me, or something?” 

Aethelflaed was looking at him, too, her eyes wide and soft, like she might have been thinking of the same things, of their hearts, beaten against each other until they were bloody. 

“What do you mean?” Erik asked. 

She covered her face with her hands, laughing at herself in an embarrassed sort of way. “That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it? I mean…you haven’t…been with anyone else. I’m just surprised, I guess.” 

Erik felt his own embarrassment rise — that sense of shame, like she was laughing at him for not being able to get laid. But he knew that’s not what she meant, and he tried to shake the feeling off until it was just a lingering echo. 

“Um…” They were close on the couch but not quite touching. That felt right in this moment. “It was just…I don’t know. I didn’t have much opportunity, and then…when there was the opportunity, I just didn’t….there wasn’t anyone I really wanted to do that with. It just didn’t happen, I guess.” 

She nodded, staring through him a bit, and bit her bottom lip. “But you want to do that with me? Now?” 

Erik almost laughed, but it was hard to laugh in the taut tenderness of the moment. “Do you really need to keep asking me that?” 

Aethelflaed’s face twisted. “It’s just….” Her voice got very small. “You didn’t want me, before.” 

Erik’s chest felt suddenly bruised from the inside out, raw like an over-ripe plum, aching like it had been that day — from Sigefrid’s fists, and from the hard, ripping thing that had happened between them, between him and Aethelflaed. 

So they were going to talk about it. 

“I thought you understood,” he said to his hands. “I thought…I know I was…cruel to you. But I thought you might’ve understood, in the end. What I really meant.” 

“That you did want to be with me?” 

Erik looked up, and her face was very sad. There might have been a sheen of tears over her eyes. He blinked a few times. 

“Aethelflaed…” 

She pointed her chin up, squaring her jaw at him a bit. “I broke up with Aethelred, you know. That’s what I was coming to tell you. You know that, right?” 

“I…” Erik let out a heavy breath. “I know, Aethelflaed.” 

There was silence for a long time, and Erik wondered if the moment had broken. How could they have sex now, with all that out in the air? It wasn’t just sex. It had never just been sex, and now that they’d admitted as much to each other, what clear-headed choice could they possibly make? 

“I thought about you, you know,” she said. Her voice was a little wavy. “For months, I thought about you, and I missed you. I still…” she trailed off, as if unable to finish the thought. 

Erik’s throat felt very thick. “But you slept with other people? You had other relationships?” He meant to say this in a hopeful sort of way, encouraging, not accusatory. But he wasn’t sure it landed quite as he meant it. 

“Yea.” Aethelflaed nodded, looking down. “I did, yea. Some of it was really good, too. But…I don’t know. It wasn’t quite the same.” 

Erik nodded, unspeaking. He couldn’t say he understood. He hadn’t even tried. 

“Did you think of me?” Aethelflaed’s voice broke over the last word, and there was a swell of sadness like tears into Erik’s head. “Did you miss me, too?”

“Aethelflaed —” The surge moved through him, impulsive and warm in his limbs. He pulled her into his arms, wrapping himself around her so that she was very close against his chest. He kissed the side of her face, near her hairline, and smoothed her head with his hand. She let a shaky breath out on his throat. 

“Of course I thought about you. Of course, I…” Her lips were against his neck, very light, almost hovering above the skin. She had tucked one hand up the sleeve of his T-shirt, and now he could feel her nails curling over his shoulder, digging gently into him. 

Erik thought about every single time he had thought of her, or he tried to, but he couldn’t, because there were too many times to count. But he thought of them all as best he could, in the way one thinks about a vast, vague thing, as if they were many facets of a large, unknowable spirit. A spirit that had haunted him for months and months. 

He couldn’t tell her all that, could he? 

Erik spoke very quietly, almost directly into her ear. “I thought about you until I ached, Aethelflaed,” he said. “And then I’d have to make myself come — thinking about you.” 

Aethelflaed’s body seized against him, her hand clamping on his arm, every part of her pressed with sudden intensity into every part of him that she touched. 

“Erik,” she gasped. His own hand was tight on her neck, and he brought the other up to her face, tracing the shape of her lips with his thumb. They weren’t moving fast, he thought they might have been moving quite slowly actually. But there was such a force behind it — emotional more than physical. It felt even more intense in the slowness. 

Erik turned his body and lowered her down slowly so she was on her back on the couch. He lay over her, bracing himself on his elbows to keep from crushing her. 

“Will you tell me?” she said. She was pulling him closer, her hands twisted in his T-shirt. “Tell me what you thought about, when you touched yourself?”

Erik slid one hand up her thigh with slow, steady pressure, pushing underneath her skirt, so that it rode up on her hips. Then he sat back and unzipped his own pants again, pulling them down and off his legs. He watched her where she lay — her face red, her hair mussed behind her head where it met the couch. She was shimmying out of the skirt, dragging it off her body, and then they were both naked from the waist down and Erik was lying on top of her again. Their thighs slid across each other, soft and warm, and Erik took himself in his hand and pressed his erection against her opening, rubbing back and forth like he might do to bring himself relief. 

“ _God_ , Erik —!”

“I thought about your mouth on me,” he said. Aethelflaed was gasping and squirming beneath him, angling herself so he might sink closer into her. But he kept himself just barely touching her. It was just enough so that the wetness of her could slide down his length, making the motion of his hand smoother. “Not like tonight,” he said, into the side of her face. “But like before, in my room? When we were on the couch and you went down on your knees. I — I thought about that so much, Aethelflaed.” 

She actually gave a little cry, arching up so that her breasts pressed against his chest. There was still layers of fabric between them, and she started unhooking some clasps at the front of her shirt that Erik hadn’t even known were there. If he’d known, he would have fantasized about undoing them just like she was doing now. The shirt fell open, revealing her breasts. He wanted to touch them, but both his hands were busy holding himself up in more ways than one. So he brought his mouth to them and kissed them until she moaned. 

“What you did tonight,” he said, against her skin. “Going down on me, against the wall? I’ll think about that, too. I’ll think about that later, if you want me to.” 

“Yes,” Aethelflaed said, like a plea. 

Erik didn’t know quite what was happening to him. This kind of stuff - talking like this - it wasn’t easy for him, it didn’t come naturally. It was the kind of thing that would make him sweaty with awkwardness to even think about out of context. 

But it was easy now, it was easy with Aethelflaed. It had always been easier with her, to give and receive, like they could read each other’s minds - or each other’s bodies - like they just knew what the other one wanted, without even having to say it, and once they knew, giving it was the easiest thing in the world. 

But Aethelflaed did say what she wanted now. 

“Show me,” She said. “Show me what else you thought about.” Her hands were snaking up under his shirt, and he had to let his hand fall away from himself so she could pull it off over his head. “Erik, I — I thought about you like that, too, when I touched myself, and — ” 

She cut herself off with a moan as their bodies met again, totally naked, their skin so warm against each other. Erik thought he could swim in the feeling of her beneath him. He wanted to run his hands over every surface and plane of her, until she was hot and red just from the pressure of his palms. 

He brought his hand up to her throat instead, clasping it gently. He hooked his other arm behind her head, cradling her between his hands, tethering her beneath him by touching the most fragile parts of her. He pressed her leg out with his knee. 

“I thought about this,” he said, and he slid inside of her. 

It was so easy. They both gasped a little — at the easiness of it. She was so wet and so warm, all around him, tight against him, and there was nothing between them, nothing at all but the feeling of her. He had never felt anything quite like it. 

They were still for a moment. His mouth was fixed over hers, but they weren’t kissing. They just held their faces close, sharing a breath as they joined together. Erik had been hard for her for so long, aching and throbbing with a painful need since way down in the basement, that this feeling was almost quiet in comparison. It was like a sigh of relief. It was like the eye of a storm.

“Did you think about this?” He asked, quietly. For some reason, he felt more nervous to ask than to tell. 

“Yes,” she whispered. 

And then they were moving and kissing, sliding against each other in an urgent rush, and Erik was overcome with the feeling of it, and with the sound of her gasping beneath him. 

Aethelflaed opened her legs so he could fit deeper into her, and it was so deep that it felt almost hard and sore. Erik wondered for a wild moment if this was her pain, if they had gotten so close that he could feel her pain inside his own body, the hard soreness of his body deep inside her own. 

But she wasn’t shying away from the feeling. She was groaning and shaking with each thrust and pulling him closer.

“That’s good, Erik —!” she gasped. “That’s so good —”

“You’re so good,” he said, and then realized how stupidly moonish of a thing that was to say. He thrust into her to cover his feeling of awkwardness. “I mean, you feel so good. It feels so good to be inside of you.” 

She was crying out again, a desperate, urgent sound. “I thought about you over me, like this,” she said. “Holding me down, and your hands tight on me.” 

Erik’s hands moved on impulse to grip the tops of her arms, forcing her down into the couch, his fingers tightening until she cried and said “ _Yes_ ” at the pressure. He looked down at her, and her chest was pink with the effort, her mouth open, her eyes wide and searching on his face. 

“Aethelflaed— _fuck_ —,” Erik wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out. The feeling of this, it was dragging through him, searing across him like a hot coal, pulling him out of himself and into her. And then she said, “Don’t stop,” and he thought he wasn’t going to — 

There was a rattling, scraping sound from across the room. They both realized at the same moment that someone was opening the trap door, and they collapsed into each other in a wild, sweaty panic. Aethelflaed curled in on herself, and Erik shifted so that her body was shielded between the back of the couch and his own. The movement forced him out of her, and he nearly shook with the loss of it, sore and wretched with need. He had to bury his mouth against Aethelflaed’s neck to keep himself from making a pathetic sound. 

Someone was climbing through the hole with the sloppy, shuffling movements of an intoxicated body, and Erik and Aethelflaed both stayed still and silent, trying to control their ragged breath. The tapestry was still there, shielding them from that side of the room, and as long as the intruder didn’t walk around to the other side, they might not be seen…

There was the sound of a box being opened, scraping cardboard, and then the clatter and clink of glass against glass. Erik released his mouth from Aethelflaed’s neck and breathed the words against her ear. 

“Is it just one?” 

“I can’t see,” she whispered back. 

Erik kissed her very softly on her shoulder. His hand was on her ribs, and he brought it up slowly to hold her breast and touch her nipple with his thumb. It was stupid, he knew, they should be as still as possible — he knew this. But there was something about the tension of the moment, the loss of the contact of their bodies, the dangerous secrecy of it…and the fact that he was throbbing more painfully than he’d ever been in his life. 

He had to touch her.

Aethelflaed bit back a groan as his thumb moved across her with more pressure. 

“Yes…” she breathed against him. She fixed her gaze on him, holding his eyes with her own, and then brought her hand down between them, grasping the tip of him and moving it against herself in small circles. Erik squeezed her probably too hard in an effort to control himself, and put his mouth against her face again, almost biting his own tongue. 

“Do you know what else I thought about?” He whispered. He heard his own voice, half-gasping, felt his hand digging into the flesh of her hip. Aethelflaed’s eyes grew wide. 

There was another clinking sound. What was this person doing, going through their secret liquor stash? They seemed drunk enough already. 

“Tell me,” Aethelflaed said.

“I thought about…when you were beneath me, and you wanted me — you wanted me to say —”

Loud footsteps again. Erik swallowed his words, thinking they were coming further into the room, but no — they were retreating down the stairs and then the door was sliding closed behind them with a wooden thunk. 

There was a brief, still moment of relief. 

“Aethelflaed—”

She cut him off, pushing him away from her urgently and then climbing on top of him. There was no pause, there was no breath, she just sunk herself onto him, and then Erik was curling his body up at the feeling. It was almost too intense, and he brought his hands to her hips as if to fix her there, but she was riding him, and her face was shot through with it, and he couldn’t stop her. He wouldn’t stop her. 

“ _God_ —” he moaned, “This is —- _fuck,_ Aethelflaed —!” She smiled at the sight of him beneath her. _You’re mine_. Hadn’t he been about to say that? Hadn’t he thought he was in control?

But Aethelflaed leaned down and put a hand over his mouth, as if she knew what he was going to say and didn’t want him to say it. His mind swam in confusion for a moment.

And then she said, “You’re mine. Aren’t you, Erik? You’re mine. You belong to me.” 

The words sliced into him like a hot knife. Erik pulled her down, forcing her body close to his chest. It slowed the motion of their rocking together, but she still pressed her hips back into him, making him pulse inside of her. Her hand slid off his face. 

“Yes —!” he gasped. “Aethelflaed, I’m yours.” She was holding him down like he’d held her down, pressing his shoulders into the couch, and he surrendered to her control. “I belong to you,” he said. 

It was the truth. 

She was moaning, a long, staggered panting cry, and she was shaking a little, too. He could feel her hips trembling against his own. He thought she might be close, and just that thought was enough.

“I’m gonna come —,” he said, and for one moment he had the instinct to pull out, to pick her up off of him and come on himself. 

But he didn’t have to do that, he realized. 

Her hand was twisting tight into his hair. Her face was hot against his own. 

“Come,” she told him. 

And they did, together. 

There were no words for the feeling of it. 

Aethelflaed’s body was warm and very solid against him, her breath brushing lightly across his chest. Erik thought she might have been asleep, or drifting somewhere close to it, and there was a heavy feeling around the edge of his mind, too. It wouldn’t have been hard to sink below the surface and be lost with her there. But there was something else hovering around his mind. Something sharp and tight like a vice. 

He eased out from under her, sliding his body to the edge of the couch. She stirred a bit, but he lowered her shoulders gently back on to the cushions and then she relaxed back into rest. 

Erik let out a sigh of relief. 

It’s not that he didn’t want to wake her. He didn’t _want_ to leave her here like a ghost, without so much as a goodbye. But he was also aware that he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed say to her, now. And maybe it would be easier…

He picked his boxers and jeans up off the floor, pulling them on as quietly as he could. The clink of his belt buckle sounded very loud in the large, silent space. 

“Are you leaving?” Aethelflaed’s voice was thick and sleepy. He turned to see her stirring behind him, pushing herself up to a seated position. Her body was a pale twist of naked limbs against the couch, her hair a ragged nest clinging to her head. 

Erik had to look away from her. “Yea,” he said. He picked his T-shirt up off the floor. “I thought I probably should.” 

She was quiet as he pulled it on over his head. “I’ll come with you,” she said, starting to collect her own clothes. 

“You should wait a bit,” Erik said, still facing away from her. “Let me go and then…follow later.”

He heard her snort. “Does it really matter?”

“Maybe not.” Erik smoothed the fabric over the knee of his jeans, trying to calm the low ache in his chest. It didn’t really work. “But, it’s probably a good idea anyway.” 

Aethelflaed moved behind him and he felt her hand brush his shoulder with a tender touch. He flinched. He didn’t mean to, but he did. Her hand dropped away. 

“Oh.” Aethelflaed’s voice was flat. It fell like a heavy brick between them. “So this is the part where you go cold again.”

Erik didn’t look at her. He wanted to say something, anything, something like _I’m not trying to be cold,_ or _What do you want me to say, Aethelflaed?_ But instead, he felt a shudder rising up in him, almost like panic, almost like pain. He put his head into his hands, pressing his palms very hard against his eyes, as if he could hold it back, as if he could hold it all inside of his skull. His breath came in staggered, like a stalling engine, and he was ashamed of the sound. 

“Erik?” She touched him again, her fingers tentative on his shoulders. He didn’t flinch this time — he was too busy trying to push his face back together, trying to keep his eyes in place — and so she touched him more, smoothing her hands down his shoulders. 

The ache was so heavy in his throat he almost choked on it, but he sobbed instead. It was a quiet, stifled sound at first. He tried to bite off each gasp before it even started, but then that just made every one sound more panicked, more wild. He would have smothered the noise in his own fist if he could’ve. 

“Erik,” she said again, kind and gentle, but that just made it worse, and he folded over more, crunching his body down to his legs, as if he could fend off her tenderness, and the sense of her behind him, and the memory of belonging to her, the feeling of belonging to her —none of which he was actually allowed to keep. 

None of which he was actually allowed to have. 

She was holding him now from behind, wrapping her arms around him and pressing the side of her face against his back. 

“Erik, I’m so sorry, Erik,” she was saying. “I’m so sorry.” 

Erik took an in-breath, a loud, wet, gasping sound, and then roughly wiped his face. He brought his hands to her own, where they were clasped around his chest, and then held them for a moment. He pressed his mouth against her fingers and tried to control his breath. His whole body trembled with the effort. 

“Why are you sorry?” He said. His voice was as thin and tight as his throat. “You didn’t do anything.” 

“But…I did. I did this. I wanted this. It happened because of me, and I know — I know you can’t — ”

“I meant what I said, Aethelflaed.” He hoped she understood what he was saying. He couldn’t say it again. “But…” 

_But you can’t ever belong to me, because nothing belongs to me, not even my own life_. 

There was a long silence around the words he didn’t say. 

Erik wiped his face again and sniffed the stuffed, choked feeling up into his nose as far as it could go. He turned to her, wondering how raw he looked. 

“Do you have your phone?”

“My phone?” She was confused at his abrupt change his tone, he knew, his forced ease. Her arms had fallen off of him to hold herself, to shield her naked body against whatever strange thing he was now.

“Do you have your phone with you?” 

“No…it’s in my coat, in the basement.” 

“Oh…um…” Erik rummaged in his back pocket, pulling out the phone there. It was his “personal” phone, which meant it wasn’t the one his Dad used to get in touch with him, but it still didn’t actually belong to him. “What’s your number?” 

“Erik…” she was looking at him with a guarded expression. “Is this really…what you want?”

He handed her the phone with a New Contact window brought up. She took it numbly, and then typed her number out slowly on the touch screen. Erik received it back without speaking and drafted a quick text. “It’s E,” he wrote, and pressed send. 

“There. You have my number now.” 

“Why?” 

“So…you can text me. If you want. Don’t text anything…personal, or private or anything, just…” he glanced away again, down towards his feet. “If you want….me. You can text.” 

Aethelflaed’s eyes bore into his face. The tears had dried on it, but it was still swollen and tight, and Erik felt self-conscious under her gaze. “5 minutes ago you were going to leave without saying goodbye,” she said. 

Erik’s foot was tapping a tiny rhythm against the floor. He had to make a conscious effort to stop it. “So don’t text then.” 

“I don’t understand what you want, Erik. Just… _tell me._ ”

Erik brought his hand up to the smooth skin of her neck, laying one long stroke down her shoulder. “I’m.…” he swallowed, feeling the words like rocks in his throat, almost too heavy to be said. “I’m not allowed to want things, Aethelflaed. But…you are. So if you want me….just text, okay?”

Aethelflaed stared at him for a long moment, blinking. And then she nodded, as if she understood, or was trying to, at least. 

“I’m gonna go,” he said, because every part of him was very tenuously hanging together by a few thin strands of will, and he wasn’t certain how much further they could stretch. 

Aethelflaed tilted her chin up in that defiant way she sometimes did. “Kiss me,” she said. Her eyes were a little bright. “Will you kiss me? I want you to.” 

It was a test, Erik thought. She was testing his promise. He leaned in and drew her face close, tilting her head up with a gentle hand, easing her mouth open and then deepening into it with his tongue. Her hands felt hot and tight on his neck. He almost wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close, running his hands across the nakedness of her one more time. But instead, he drew away and made to stand. He picked up his flannel from off the couch, where it lay next to a rumpled pile of Aethelflaed’s clothes. 

“I’ll text you,” she said, with a small nod, a decisive gesture, like she wanted him to know he had passed the test. 

“Good,” he said. He gave her one more look — at her body, pale like a smudge of moonlight, at her face, almost unreadable, like opaque glass. 

And then he turned and made his way down the trap door, back out into Aylesbury House and then further out into the cold night. And after that? Out, infinitely, into whatever came next. 

It was a familiar feeling — too familiar, maybe. But for the first time, he liked it. For the first time in his life, he was glad not to be in control.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alexa, play “When the Party’s Over” by Billie Eilish 
> 
> — *Spongebob Voice*: Three Months Later —
> 
> “Turns out, Erik didn’t really like it like that.”
> 
> ANYWAY, that means it’s on to PART THREE which I am so very very very excited about. Honestly this whole story has kind of just been a bridge between Parts 1 and 3 so I can set up some dynamics that are going to be very important in the next segment. Some of you already know exactly what those dynamics are, and for others, I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say: 
> 
> 1\. It is very gay.   
> 2\. I love it very much.


End file.
